Backing up a MySQL server with mixed character sets This may sound like a really simple question, but I've not found a straight answer with a lot of googling!

I have a MySQL database server which has databases with various different character encodings (largely a mix of latin1 and utf8)

Are there any recommendations when using mysqldump to back up the the entire server (one db at a time), when for each individual database I will not know what the character set is that is being used? 

(I have a bash script which gets all the DBS on the server, and then runs mysqldump individually on each one - copied below)

I know I can set the default encoding to use with mysqldump by specifiying that as an argument to the mysqldump command - should I just be setting that to UTF-8? Will that be OK for the latin encoded DBs?

#!/bin/bash
mkdir `date -I`;
dblist=`mysql -h myhosthere -u myuser -pmypassword -e "show databases" | sed -n '2,$ p'`
for db in $dblist; do
   mysqldump -h myhosthere -u myuser -pmypassword $db | gzip --best &gt; home/user/`date -I`/$db.sql.gz
done;
I think the safest thing is to specify dumping in utf8mb4.  Hopefully all the characters you have in all the character sets will convert correctly to (and from, when reloading) that charset.