Hi there,
Is it possible to manually retrieve single files from a virtual server's home directory within a backup archive?
This is what's in my bz2 archive:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 57M 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_dir -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 405 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_dns -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 165 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_logrotate -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mail -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mail_aliases -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mail_cron -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 286 2007-09-12 04:18 mydomain.com_mail_plainpass -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 586 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mail_users -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mysql -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 181K 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_mysql_database_mydomain.gz -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 278 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_spam -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_spam_auto -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10K 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_spam_cf -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1.9K 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_virtualmin -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 59K 2007-09-24 01:31 mydomain.com_virtualmin-awstats -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.5K 2008-01-02 22:00 mydomain.com_virtualmin_bw -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_virtualmin_scripts -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 912 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_web -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30K 2008-01-02 22:48 mydomain.com_webmin
The size of mydomain_dir corresponds to the original apache public directory, but I can't use that file in the raw format.
Some additional documentation on the internals of the backup process would be very much appreciated.
Cheers, Nick<br><br>Post edited by: nick108, at: 2008/01/02 12:01
If it's a directory it is tarred. If it's a file, it's just a file (though it may need further processing to make it useful, in the case of the Apache configuration, Webmin configuration, mail users, and MySQL users). I believe this is true all around.
So, you can untar the master archive:
tar zxvf domain.tld.tar.gz
or:
tar jxvf domain.tld.tar.bz2
And then:
tar xvf domain.tld_dir
The regular files can be viewed exactly as is using your favorite text editor. Virtualmin knows where they all go, of course, but they could also be restored manually--though you'd need to dig a bit to figure out where they go (some are for subdirectories of /etc/webmin/virtual-server, some are for injection into the Apache configuration, Postfix virtual map file, etc.) Some might even be Perl data structures dumped with Data::Dumper or some other serialized form (I'm just guessing...haven't looked deeply into the backup format in ages, since I haven't run into any problems that required it--the backup/restore is pretty reliable and flexible these days).
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Thanks for the quick reply, Joe.
Almost all files in the backup archive are flat config files or e.g. a mysql dump, but the domain.tld_dir file is confusing me. Maybe because it's serialized as you mentioned. Is there an easy way (outside of VM) to convert the domain.tld_dir file into it's original folder and file structure? Is there a command line utility that can do this. I'm not a perl bunny and therefore I'm a bit hesitant to dive deeper into the Data::Dumper method.
You must have gotten an answer to this a long time ago, but it seems
tar xf domain.tld_dir would pull everything out of that tar file and recreate all the directories with files in it.