Virtualmin backup structure

Howdy -- it's difficult to say why the archive won't open on your Windows system... it may be that the particular tool you're using doesn't support the compression being used. Unfortunately, we're not big users of Windows systems, so it's difficult to recommend a particular tool :-)

However, once you open the archive, you'd typically see the users files right there.

If you're having trouble getting that working on Windows -- the way to open the archives on Linux is:

tar jxvf domain.tar.bz2

tar zxvf domain.tar.gz

Thanks for the note about the bad URL. It was pointing to a URL that was for the old website, so I've updated that. The correct URL is here:

https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/developer/cli/backup_and_restore/

If you select the "One file per server" backup format, the contents of the backup will basically be just the domain's home directory.

A note from my end: I'm using the tool "Total Commander" to look inside the TAR archives (TGZ in my case), and I found that their structure as it appears on a Windows system indeed seems to be a little "strange" (yet intact).

In the root of the TAR there appear subdirectories that are named 11-digit decimal numbers, like 11470242643 to 11476602101 in one example. They look like Linux timestamps or similar. Inside those is a directory named "." (current-dir), and inside that is a particular (part of a) subdirectory of the user's home, in addition to a directory ".backup" which contains the Virtualmin settings of the domain.

Yet despite of the "odd" structure, which may well be just the way that Total Commander interprets the TAR contents - although when I e.g. download some PHP script in TGZ format, there's usually not this strange timestamp-subdirectories in it - the archives unpack all fine on a Linux system.

So I guess it's possible that Virtualmin uses some mode or variant of TAR that causes oddities on Windows systems, in my case the timestamp subdirs, in your case maybe a complete failure to open the archives with your particular tool. A test would be, as was suggested here, to unpack one of them on Linux and see if they're okay.

I can't really speak to the way "Total Commander" shows archives, but the best way to see their contents on Linux would be with a command like :

tar tvzf backupfile.tar.gz

The command is something like :