I won’t repeat my frequent anti-Plesk rant, but suffice to say: it’s a pain.
For some reason, we wanted one file back out of a backup. It took me a few minutes to realise it, but Plesk’s backups are essentially MIMEd and gzipped. So, rather than fighting with their mysterious semi-documented backup-unpack tool, just say:-
zcat backupfile | sed -n -e '/name="filename.whatever/,/^--_--/p' >filename.whatever
If you don’t know the filename, zless’ing the head of the file should find it from the XML description blocks pretty quickly. Slight editing of the output file will be necessary, to strip MIME and so on, but it’s easier than installing too much else on a webserver.
Does anyone know why this gzipped-MIME is better than tar.gz or something else common and easy-to-use?
I noticed this before; I was in one of those “absolutely must get a file from this backup, right now” situations, and all the client had available was a Windows PC.
Turns out that if you change the file extension to .eml, you can open a Plesk backup in Thunderbird/Outlook, and the files in the backup appear as email attachments.
Because they want you to jump through hoops so that you’re locked to their system?
Too bad it doesn’t work 🙂
Jon Atkinson – don’t email clients throw a fit at a multi-gig email?
Wouter Verhelst – well, it might have worked, if only their backup-unpack tool wasn’t so utterly awkward and slow. If backup-unpack had worked, I might never have examined the file and would have accepted it was a Plesk-only format.
@Jon Atkinson It didn’t work for me, I get an error:
“The command line argument is not valid. Verify the switch you are using”
And no joy, I have a backup plesk file for one of my domains and I can’t get it to open, all I need is the files in there so that I can put them on my new hosting on Cpanel.
No idea what to do next, I really need those files.
@Sunlust Designs – what command were you trying?
Won’t Cpanel have similar problems? Seems like out of the frying pan and into a fire. I think both DTC and PenguinPanel are better bets…
@MJ Ray – no command, that’s the point, I’ve tried opening it with Outlook etc and I get an error, I somehow opened it with some default Windows Email software but I still wasn’t able to save the files, they would give me an error.
The httpdocs file I’m interested in somehow is 400MB big and on websites with advices they say that opening by email only works between 10-100MB size.
No joy in getting my files…