First, I must say that even though weve been using Plesk control panels for a while, lately based on the ability to customize the server environment im starting to like CPANEL way more than plesk .... just my two cents, but well ...

First of all, lets start by providing an example of the command to make a backup on plesk, if you have a big server with lots of clients it will be a good idea to split your dumps into several archives with a file name patterns.

The command below does that exactly:

/usr/local/psa/bin/psadump -F --force --nostop --do-not-dump-logs -z -f - | split -b1500m - /path/dumpplesk.

To explain the command above properly, it will make dumps without log files of the whole server which will be split into 1.5 GB archives which will be stored into the path: /path using a file pattern of dumpplesk.

For example if the whole dump process was done in 3 files, the names of those files would be:

dumpplesk.aa
dumpplesk.ab
dumpplesk.ac

It would be a good idea to copy that command into a bash file, give the script permissions with chmod a+x and execute the backup on a cron file in that way.

Now, what if you need to make a restore ???

Beleive it or not, plesk really did not provided much information on how to do a restore from a backup that consists on multiple dumps, but after facing our hard drive crash, the command below did the task:

cat /pathdump/dumpplesk.* | /usr/local/psa/bin/psarestore --force --noblock -m map_file -s shells_map_file -f -

The command above will read the dump files located on the path /pathdump with pattern dumpplesk.* , it will create both a shellmap and an ipmap in case the there are some changes on the ip map you will use for the new file, or on the shell access you will provide to your clients.

Again, from my experience all i can say the restore command works fairly, after our experience we realized psarestore did not restored a few mysql databases and a few mail boxes, something that in all honesty weve never experienced with CPANEL, again ... my 2 cents.

Hope this was usefull ;)

Felipe Cruz.