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How to extract files from a Plesk backup archive

Daniel Yordanov
Updated
Plesk for Windows kb: how-to Plesk for Linux

Applicable to:

  • Plesk for Linux
  • Plesk for Windows

Question

How to unpack the contents of a Plesk backup?

Answer

Starting from Plesk Obsidian 18.0.40, GZIP compression used in the Plesk backups has been replaced with ZSTD compression to improve performance for backup and restore operations.

To unpack a TZST archive, follow these steps:

Click on a section to expand

Directly on a Plesk server using tar

  1. Connect to the Plesk server via SSH.

  2. Create a directory where the backup is going to be extracted:

    # mkdir /root/backup

  3. Use the --use-compress-program pzstd option to unpack the archive:

    # tar -xvf /var/lib/psa/dumps/domains/example.com/backup_logs_2111250004_2111290004.tzst -C /root/backup/ --use-compress-program pzstd

After downloading a Plesk backup file to your local computer

Download and install the tzst compatible archive manager and use it to extract the files.

Some archive managers that can work with ZSTD compression for Linux desktop:

Some archive managers that can work with ZSTD compression for Windows:

Some archive managers that can work with ZSTD compression for Mac:

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Comments

6 comments
Date Votes
  • Avatar
    Christian

    How about for Mac users?  There's no input given here to do this on MacOS.

    1
  • Avatar
    Unnamed User
    (Edited )

    The directions above are wrong, at least for windows 10 - 11. What you need to do is:

    1) Download zstd (who thought of that name???) https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/releases

    2) Place zstd.exe from archive above inside the same directory where your .tzst - tzstxxx files are

    3) Open a command prompt of windows and cd to that directory

    4) merge the files if you have more than one. To do this you need to run:

    copy /b/y backup_xxxxxx_xxxxxx.tzst + backup_xxxxxx_xxxxxx.tzst1 + backup_xxxxxx_xxxxxx.tzst2 + backup_xxxxxx_xxxxxx.tzstxxx finalbackupfile.tzst

    5) Run tar -xvf backup_xxxxxx_xxxxxx.tzst

    Thats it, your files will exctract at the same directory

    0
  • Avatar
    Jeremy Navick

    Christian

    Try Keka : https://www.keka.io/

    0
  • Avatar
    Mitchell van Bijleveld

    Christian

    You can use brew to install zstd

    brew install zstd

    and then run

    unzstd archive.tzst

    This gives you a native tar file which you can extract by running

    tar -xvf archive.tar

    3
  • Avatar
    chri crossley

    Can you supply a simple set of instructions for the Mac I have a backup running on my two Plesk setups but can't view the contents of the files. So the backup is pointless if I have to use a Plesk machine to recover them. I don't want to install home-brew on my Mac to get around what should be a simple de-archive process.

    0
  • Avatar
    Jens Roggemann

    Hello Daniel,

    Thans for this hint:

    (it was little annoying, that the Plesk Download-Manager don't mention any option to get single files extracted from the Plesk-Backup-Files. So your hint is really helpful! 😎)
    Kind regards. Jens

    0

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