We alreay know how to extract files from Plesk backup with mpack, but if you do receive “File size limit exceeded” error, it can be from the following reasons:

• Your file system doesn’t have LFS (large file support) support
• OS limits (limits on the system resources imposed by your administrator)
• mpack is not compiled with LFS

Check that your filesystem supports files bigger than 2GB (create a test file with “dd” command).

[vitalie@silver ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.bin bs=1G count=3 # create 3GB file

Then check your file size limits with ulimit command:

[vitalie@silver ~]$ ulimit -a | grep '^file size'
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited

You can adjust limits from /etc/security/limits.conf, read file comments on how to do it, or read this article:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/file-size-limit-exceeded-error-under-linux-and-solution/

If none above limits you, then the problems comes from mpack, it doesn’t have suport for large files (>2GB).

The guys from the Plesk recommends to grep the backup file, to find begin and end of the file in archive:
http://kb.parallels.com/en/1757

This solutions is not appropriate for large backup files, we’ll just recompile mpack to support large files.

Grab mpack’s RPM source from the Dag’s repository
http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/mpack/mpack-1.6-2.rf.src.rpm

install it:

[vitalie@silver ~]$ rpm -ivh mpack-1.6-2.rf.src.rpm
[...]

Then modify mpack.spec and add the following code after “%build”:

export CFLAGS="-D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64"

Then rebuild the package and install it:

[vitalie@silver ~] rpm -ba mpack.spec
[...]
[vitalie@silver ~] rpm -Uvh --force mpack-1.6-3.rf.i386.rpm
[...]

References:

• Linux PAM
• jperalta.wordpress.com
• www.cyberciti.biz

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.