Restore / uncompress a plesk backup file using terminal
Today I was had to move a few web sites from one server to another. As I did not have ssh or ftp access to it, the only way to do it was through Plesk. As I don’t have experience using Plesk, I did not know that Plesk’s built in File Explorer can only be used to manage your web site’s files within the server, but it does not let you download those files. So, looking around Plesk’s admin interface I found the backup feature. That looked promissing, so I clicked on it and it brought me to another page called “Backup Manager”. This page allows you to set up periodic or one time backups. Backups can be saved in Plesk’s local repository or in an external FTP server. So I set up all the FTP details and start the backup. Once the backup finished I tried to open it on a linux box and file-roller gave an error when it tried to extract it. A `file` showed that the file was indeed in gzip format.