Plesk 8 Domain Backups

I have recently undertaken the management of a number of Plesk 8 based hosting machines and came across an interesting problem today when working with backups. On this machine I have several eZ Publish installations, one of which I was looking to copy to a local drive for testing purposes. FTP just seemed like a waste of time… perhaps I was wrong.

I logged into the administration panel of Plesk to find that the backup utilities were not installed by default, thankfully Plesk makes that operation rather easy, but I am still at a loss as to which genius thought backup wouldn’t be an important enough feature to install. Granted most serious hosts are using 3rd party backup solutions like R1Soft, but still…

Having resolved that issue I proceeded to backup the domain in question and download the resulting file… which was hidden away in the middle of nowhere inside a filesystem that looks more like a rabbit warren than an organised, enterprise hosting platform. Upon downloading the file I reached the next problem… what to do with it..?

It seems that Plesk/SWSoft/Parallels have decided tar.gz is too mainstream for their product, so they opted for something more exciting, something without an extension. I haven’t had a time to even investigate what this crazy system does, but suffice to say if you have StuffIt Expander you are in luck. Drag the file onto StuffIt and it decompresses it into what OS X believes to be a number of executable files. Drag the required files onto StuffIt to expand those into the files you require.

Is it just me, or does this seem stupid? Maybe Plesk got it right and they just forgot to inform us about this whiz bang thing they developed… anyone have any thoughts on this?