First of all, this is the PSA 8.0 forum, psadump and psarestore were 7.5.x and earlier. With PSA 8 we're talking about pleskbackup and pleskrestore.
I have experienced this issue with email directories not being restored as well as users email accounts not being recreated. So pleskbackup is definitely not a full proof plan, though its saved me a couple of times I must admit.
Here is how I handle backups:
- Daily
I run a perl script that runs:
pleskbackup --all /tmp/daily.dump
This of course is not full proof. Also within my script I run some system level copies of the mailnames directory, the qmail control files, the web root of all domains hosted by plesk, the mysql root, the /etc/psa directory and some other misc stuff. I then tarball up the dump, the directory copies, and whatever else I want to backup daily into 1 file and dump it on my NFS server. What this accomplishes is not only do I have the pleskbackup dump file, but also hard copies of my most important data, so whatever the PSA utility skips, I can manually restore. These tarballs are saved as far back as a month.
- Weekly
I run full backups of my PSA server with Amanda to my NFS server. These are saved back 3 weeks worth (3 files).
- Monthly
I run the same as the weekly but on the 1st of every month. I save 2 monthlies.
- Ghost/Imaging
I use an imaging utility to create a partition image of a fresh install of any PSA server I build so I can quickly restore it. Semi-annually I run images of every server and save them for a year.
Now this might be a bit obnoxious and there are many other backups routines you can use, such as tape, etc etc. This works for me and I believe the key to pleskbackup is not to rely solely on it. Use a multitude of backup processes and have a good backup/restore plan and stick to it. As far as I've seen, psadump to pleskrestore has always had issues, so build yourself a NAS box and start dumping backups there.
Another method is to employ snapshotting, again has its drawbacks.
My 2 cents...
J