Question Restoring single file from Off-site Backup

[Dennn]

Hello,

I use only Off-site Backups to save my WordPress sites, but if I want to restore just a single file from that Backup, Plesk initially restores the Full Backup in the Server and then restores the selected file.

This doubles the disk space and it can take days to restore since it depends on the size of the Backup, while the file that I want to restore is only 1 MB.

Why Plesk restores the Full Backup while I want to restore only a single file?!

This practice is very bad for large sites, because if something goes wrong it would take days to restore it!

 

[IgorG]

while I want to restore only a single file?!

Actually, you can do it: How to restore a website file from a Plesk backup

 

[Dennn]

Actually, you can do it: How to restore a website file from a Plesk backup

Thank you for your response IgorG.

If I have created a full Off-site Backup which is 300 GB, Plesk initially will copy this to the Server Storage and then I can restore the files that I want.

This might take days and even months, depending on the Backup size.

My question is: Why I can't restore only a single file from that 300 GB Backup, I don't want the whole Backup copied to my Server Storage just for a single file?

I wanted to restore only a single file, but Plesk restores the Full Backup on the Server Storage and then restores that file!

This does not make sense!

 

[Bitpalast]

If I have created a full Off-site Backup which is 300 GB, Plesk initially will copy this to the Server Storage and then I can restore the files that I want.
This might take days and even months, depending on the Backup size.
My question is: Why I can't restore only a single file from that 300 GB Backup, I don't want the whole Backup copied to my Server Storage just for a single file?
I wanted to restore only a single file, but Plesk restores the Full Backup on the Server Storage and then restores that file!
This does not make sense!

It absolutely makes sense.

The backup is not stored as single files on the backup repository, but as an archive. If you were to store every single file separately, a backup would take ages and occupy as much space on your backup location as the original files. If you want to have such a backup, I recommend to create your own rsync based script to do file copies and to run your own database dumps to do database copies. However, this will still not give you email backups and Plesk configuration backups etc. It would just be an "add on" so that you can easily dive into a copy of your file structure to retrieve single files or paths.

What the Plesk restore does is that it downloads the archive file, then unpacks it on the local machine. It cannot unpack it on an FTP storage space, because there is no such FTP function and the storage space might not support Linux commands to unpack files either.

For faster retrieval of single files, you can also configure your backup to be stored in both, local and remote storage spaces. This will need a lot more space on your local disk, but then you can restore files faster from your local copy while you are still safe from disk failures with your remote copy.