Restoring Backups Manually

Sometimes it is necessary to restore backups manually for various reasons, outside of the Enhance User Interface. Doing things this way can give you more granular control over exactly what is restored. Backup restores in the user interface can also fail if there are files owned by root or other users in the site's home directory, so it can be necessary to manually restore.

Backups are stored on the backup server and the location they are stored in is:-

/{mount-point}/{website-uuid}/{snapshot}

TIP

You can see a website's UUID in the address bar when you click it in the UI)

So for example, if you have a website with the UUID 4ce7fcd9-2b6c-4338-89f0-199d61899db8 and your backup mount point is /backups, the path to that site's snapshots would be:-

/backups/4ce7fcd9-2b6c-4338-89f0-199d61899db8/snapshot-1678048114772

The number after snapshot- being the precise Unix timestamp of the backup snapshot.

Under that path you will see:-

• email
• home
• mysql

From here you can browse through the directories to find what you need. If you need to restore some files, it would be recommended to generate an SSH key on the backup server, and then add the public key to the website you want to restore to. You can then use rsync over SSH or SCP to transfer files over to the site's home directory