Manual Backup - Restoration

[pdxone]

Hi, I am dealing with a Plesk 7.5.4 system that failed during the installation to 8.1. This is running on Fedora Core 2.

We have been troubleshooting the failures (mail no longer working, can't send - receive or even login) and have come to a point of desperation. We are now looking at backing the system up, rebuilding the OS to Fedora Core 4 and installing Plesk 8.1

After this is complete, we can put everything back in place and hopefully continue on the happy trails of using Plesk 8.1.

We have backed up the Web/Domain directories manually and ftp'd them to a remote location. We have additionally backed up the mailboxes for qmail. These were both done using tar cvzf and were successfully zipped up. I am aware that we can restore the www directory on the system. However, my concern is with Qmail - can we simply dump these back into the same directories on the new server? Will that successfully restore their mailboxes or is there a better more effecient way?

We are also looking to manually backup the client data - usernames/logins etc. I believe that this is stored in either a PostgresQL or MySQL database. I am not very familiar with Plesk though and am trying to locate this data. Is this something I can manually back up very easily?

Additionally, I am going to run ./pleskbackup --all to back up the entire system via plesk. My concern with this though is the ability to restore. Has the backup/restore system changed from 7.5.4 to 8.1? Are they still compatible (ie, can I backup with 7.5.4 and restore to 8.1 successfully)? If not, what other options do we have?

I really need information on this.. any feedback is GREATLY appreciated!!

-pdxone

 

[spoonman]

bump..i need some more info on this too

 

[breun]

Yes, the backup/restore tools have changed. You can't just restore a psadump from 7.5.4 on a Plesk 8.x install. However, the latest version has introduced a backupconvert tool that claims to be able to convert Plesk 7.5.4 psadumps into pleskdumps that are compatible with Plesk 8.x. However, I have had no luck using this convert tool.

All Plesk settings, client data, etc. is stored in the MySQL database called 'psa'.

If you're going to install another OS, I wouldn't go with FC4 as that distribution is already EOL (and FC5 will be EOL at the end of next month). Go with at least FC6 or something like CentOS if you don't want to upgrade your OS again in 6 months.