Question Automatically retrieve and download Plesk backups from /var/lib/psa/dumps/

[brother4]

Server operating system version

Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS

Plesk version and microupdate number

Plesk Obsidian 18.0.74 Update 3 Web Host Edition

Hey! I would like to automatically download the last two complete Plesk backups and all associated incremental backups via shell script (from an external backup server). I explicitly do not want to use SFTP, as no incoming connections are allowed on the backup server.

Is there any useful documentation on how to back up the files under /var/lib/psa/dumps/? I am only interested in the system backups that were created in Plesk itself, not user backups. So, my concern is to better understand how Plesk organizes the backups there, what I would need to retrieve in order to make a restore possible. I am familiar with how to retrieve this using Linux shell commands, etc.

 

[brother4]

I did found this:

https://support.plesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/12377966554135-Local-backup-structure-in-Plesk-for-Linux

But I still don't quite understand how a distinction can be made here between server and user backups.

 

[Kaspar]

I am not really sure if I correctly understand your objective. But if you like to make a dump of a local backup into a single archive file, you can use the ppm-ras utility. Run /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/pmm-ras --help to get an overview of some of the available options.

For example if you like can run:

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/pmm-ras --export-dump-as-file --dump-specification=backup_info_2512230135.xml --dump-file-specification=backup_2512230135.tar

On which you can specify the backup info XML file of the backup which you want to dump (backup_info_2512230135.xml in this example) and an archive path (backup_2512230135.tar) for the dump file.