I need to explore some plesk backup files that I did a long time ago. I don't need to restore them, just to explore and take some of their content. Is there any way (software) to do that?

I already opened the main backup files discovering that inside them are: an xml file, with all the configuration information of the domain; and some files that seem to be compiled (probably containing what I am looking for, now I need to know how to open them).


Thanks.

agerio, I know you already have extracted the archive but I am including the whole procedure in case somebody else searches for how to do this.

I had to do this recently and found a post in the Plesk forums that recommended a mime extractor program called ripmime.

Download and install it on any *nix box then from the command line:

ripmime -i backupfilename -d directory_to_place_files

this will create a directory of files named 1, 2, 3 ...

Those files are mostly gzipped tar archives. To see what is in a file:

tar -tvzf filename

To extract the files from that archive (steps 1-3 are optional, but I recommend it to keep things organized if you extract from multiple archives within that backup set):

1. mkdir folder_to_put_extacted_files_in
2. cp filename folder_just_created/
3. cd folder_just_created
4. tar -xvzf filename

If you get an error indicating that the file you are accesing is not a tar archive then it is a gzipped sql file containing a database backup. If you want to extract it, use:

gzip -d filename

then change the name to include a .sql extension. You can now restore that database using mysql at the command line.