PleskDump – a Plesk backup extraction utility

At work, our server guy (let’s call him Steve) has to sometimes extract Plesk backups to retrieve old files for clients. I can’t help but notice that Steve gets sad whenever he has to do that – it turns out, it’s kind of a bitch.

Sure, he could upload the backup from our Samba share to one of the RedHat servers, do some greping, tailing, heading and piping to a file (*cough*) – but is it worth his time? Some of these backups are 3GB+ and it takes a few hours just to upload one.

I was surprised there’s no easy way of doing this on Windows, short of using cygwin. I whipped up a tool in C# to do exactly that. On Windows. With a GUI. For Steve.

Grab it from the Downloads page!

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15 Responses to PleskDump – a Plesk backup extraction utility

  1. Steven Barre says:

    Andy is my hero! This makes it sooo much easier to get “that one jpg I need” from a multi-gig backup. Or getting out just the SQL dump and not all the email folders.

  2. Pingback: Plesk Backup Extraction | Skookum Code

  3. Paul says:

    you, sir, are amazing.

  4. Jaap says:

    Hello,

    PleskDump says ‘Scanning contents…’ for a while and then just stops (‘Ready’).
    No files are shown.

    • admin says:

      Make sure the file you’re giving it is not from Plesk v9 (or later). Plesk 9 now makes proper backups, which you can open with archive tools like WinRAR.

      If you’re confident that your file is from Plesk 8 or ealier, check if you can open that file with WinRAR. There might be a single file in there – extract it and give it to PleskDump.

  5. Jaap says:

    BTW: comment is not for website, but I could not find a Contact link.

  6. laurens meurs says:

    Great tool, worked for me! :-)

  7. André Santos says:

    Hello, i have an folder C:\Program Files\Parallels\Plesk\MySQL\Backup where have some files with the extension *.dump, like psa-20110710.dump. I need to access this file because i think this contains all my mysql databases backup right? But i cant access and search on google but i cant find any solution. I try your software, but no luck. Can you help me?

  8. Anurag says:

    Hi Andy,

    This is only tool in the world which works on Plesk backups and it is damn fast.

    Thanks a lot.

    Anurag

  9. John says:

    Your tool is awesome and you sir deserve the beverage of your choice for sharing with the community. It’s people like you who share their experiences and software with others that makes life in the techie world bearable.

    P.S. Being a budding coder myself, is there any way you would share the source code. I would love to use it as a tutorial to learn off of. If not I understand and still think you are Teh Awesome!

    John.

    • Andy says:

      Thanks for the kind words!

      I’d like to share the source one day, but right now it’s a complete hacked-up mess that’s a bit too embarrassing to show :( . You could probably just decompile it if you’re really curious..

  10. Neil Livesey says:

    Amazing! Been messing for hours to try extract a load of images. Thanks so much for publishing.

  11. Pete MArtin says:

    Hello,
    Total noob here – I downloaded PleskDump but when I navigate to the backup file (backed up from Plesk 8.6) I get nothing in the window (so nothing to check) and a message that says ‘No Content to Extract’

    Any help would be genuinely lovely.

  12. brizzo says:

    This page needs to be the top of the search results on Google when searching “plesk backup”

    Was very frustrated trying to extract my backup, found this tool and my problem was solved within a minute of download.

    Thanks very much!

  13. Dougal says:

    Really really helpful. Thanks for sharing this.
    Again like a few people here I had to unarchive the downloaded backup file first, then use your utility on that.
    Best Wishes

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