So you have a plesk backup file and you want to extract and open the files from it? No problem. This blog will show you how.

The file is a mime file. The “mpack” package will let you unpack it.

First we install the “mpack” package

sudo apt-get install mpack

Let’s imagine your file is called “pleskDump.gz”. If it doesn’t have a “.gz” at the end it might not be bad to add it as some environments will complain if it’s absent.

Next we unzip the file

gunzip pleskDump.gz

Now let’s un-mime the file

mkdir pleskDumpOutput
cd pleskDumpOutput
cat ../pleskDump | munpack

Now we have a bunch of regular tar files, but be careful, if we just extract them, the root folders will not be recreated. In order to keep things together, it’s best now to look at the output you have. Let’s take a made up example:

example-domain.com.httpdocs

Note that the format is essentially domain.rootfolder or in another way, the tar files have your domain name they are archiving, then a dot, then the name of the root folder they made up. We take that root folder and create it like this:

mkdir rootfolder

Now let’s apply that idea to our previoud example; “example-domain.com”

mkdir httpdocs

It’s time to untar into the folder you just created, let’s assume you just created “httpdocs”

tar -xvf example-domain.com.httpdocs -C httpdocs

There you go! You can now output any of the folders you wanted.

If you need to extract the information from a PDF table sometimes when you copy and paste it into a text editor the formatting is incorrect making the information useless.

In cases like this, you can use pdfedit to extract the text in the correct formatting and then do what you need with it.

To use the program first make sure it’s installed. If not install it like this


sudo apt-get install pdfedit


then use it to open the PDF. Click through the the correct page and then click Page - Extract Text From Page