mysql duplicate entry error 1062 when restoring backup

I would suggest that this is indeed indicative of a problem with db3. By default, mysqldump generates "extended" insert statements, containing more than one row's worth of insert per line.

INSERT INTO table_name VALUES (...), (...), (...), ...;

This is an optimization, since multiple inserts in a single statement are much faster than executing individual insert statements.

But, you can disable this behavior using the --skip-extended-insert option.

Using that option for backups isn't a good idea, since they restore much more slowly, but this option does make dump files that are much easier to read with your eyeballs and much easier to search through for a specific record using grep or a similar tool.

Dump the database using this option and then search through the file for the duplicate keys that are throwing errors and it seems likely that you'll find duplicate rows or rows with duplicate keys that should have been unique... which means underlying table trouble in db3.

I can't think of a way this could happen with InnoDB but with MyISAM it's distinctly possible.

There are a couple of other mysqldump options that might also be useful:

• --replace generates a file writing the statements as REPLACE INTO instead of INSERT INTO which would result in the duplicate key records occurring later in the file replacing the conflicting records that occurred earlier in the file, without generating an error
• --insert-ignore generates a file with the statements written as INSERT IGNORE INTO instead of INSERT INTO, which would cause the duplicate key records occurring earlier in the file to be persisted in the restored tables, as the later conflicting records would be ignored, not inserted, and would not generate an error.