Extracting files from a Plesk 8.3 backup it’s not an easy task and it’s time consuming.
Let’s examine backup file:
[root@monster ~]# file plesk_bigserver_2008-07-10.backup plesk_bigserver_2008-07-10.backup: ASCII English text, with very long lines
Plesk backup is a multi-part mime-encoded file, you can easy restore one domain or whole server using plesk backup utilities, but when you need a few files from backup you’ll need an external tool like ripemime or mpack.
Requirements:
- Free disk space minimum 2*backup_file_size
- mpack tool
Check your free space using df(disk free) command.
[root@monster ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 9.2G 2.5G 6.3G 29% / /dev/hda1 190M 15M 166M 8% /boot none 1010M 0 1010M 0% /dev/shm /dev/hda7 53G 17G 34G 34% /home /dev/hda6 950M 17M 886M 2% /tmp /dev/hda5 46G 7.2G 37G 17% /var
Let’s install mpack. On a Redhat/Fedora/CentOS system it’s easy, just subscribe to Dag Wieers’s repository. You’ll need to download rpmforge-release rpm that’s matching your server OS and architecture:
For CentOS 5 and x86_64 architecture we’ll use rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm:
[root@monster tmp]# wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm [...] [root@monster tmp]# rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm [...] [root@monster tmp]# yum install mpack [...]
Let’s make a directory where we’ll extract backup files and then extract files there:
[root@monster ~]# mkdir recover [root@monster ~]# cd recover [root@monster ~]# munpack < ../plesk_bigserver_2008-07-15.backup [...]
Mpack will extract files into separate tar archives where you can locate the domain by archive name and extract files using tar command.