Restoring a Single Archive File backup

I am doing a test restore of a backup made using the Backup Format option of Single Archive File. However when I go to restore this file using either the web interface or restore-domain.pl it tells me that it is not a valid Not a valid tar or tar.gz file

If use the one file per server option i get a directory with 1 .tar.gz for each site.

So

a) what format is the file? I can do a more on it and view all the site settings, and it clearly isn’t a tar or gz file.

b) how can I do a restore from this file?

c) if i can’t do b) how can i restore a complete system in one shot without having to restore 1 file at a time using the one file per server option

SPECS:
Ubuntu 8.04
backup created on Virtualmin version 3.66.gpl GPL
backup restoring to Virtualmin version 3.69.gpl GPL

I am doing a test restore of a backup made using the Backup Format option of Single Archive File. However when I go to restore this file using either the web interface or restore-domain.pl it tells me that it is not a valid Not a valid tar or tar.gz file

That may be a bug – it should certainly work. If you try to untar the archive manually (ie, outside of Virtualmin) – does it work? Does the archive appear to be in-tact?

Don’t use “more” as a test – many distros add in some magic to have it display things when you run commands like “more” on an otherwise compressed archive file :slight_smile:

That said –

There’s no reason you can’t restore everything at once when doing one file per server.

That’s how I did my own migration, and is my preferred backup format.

Just point the restore source to the directory the files reside in (rather than one file in particular), and it’ll default to using all of them. From there, you can uncheck any that you don’t wish to move.
-Eric

Thanks for the quick response.

I just tried it with the One file per server and even just selecting individual sites i still get the same error. These do at least appear to be valid(ish) tar.gz files as i can extract them at commandline allbeit with the following errors

tar: Skipping to next header

gzip: stdin: invalid compressed data–format violated
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

Could this be because it is a newer version of virtualmin that I am restoring to?

Yeah, it looks like something is wrong with the tar archive.

There shouldn’t be a problem going from one Virtualmin version to another.

Are you sure the backup server has enough space?

Also, you may want to do the backup again, and verify that there aren’t any errors in the output.
-Eric

I am so glad I posted this in the Newb thread.

Don’t transfer your backup files over ftp in ascii mode. :}