Having a 12GB Plesk backup file is all well and good except if the domain you want to restore is 7GB in size (Plesk 8.1 Linux).  The Plesk restore died every time I tried to restore this specific domain.

URL: http://kb.parallels.com/en/1757

Explains 3 different methods for restoring data from the plesk backup file manually.  Method 1 was to open the file in a mail client, but, 12GB is a bit large for that. Method two suggested using munpack, which, I tried, but hit a 2GB limit and it said:

# cat DUMP_FILE | munpack
DOMAIN.TLD.httpdocs (application/octet-stream)
File size limit exceeded

So, it was time for method 3…. which was very manual and very slow.  It included grepping through the 12GB file for the tar data of httpdocs for the specific website and databases.

Something like:

# egrep -an '(^--_----------)|(testdom.com.shtdocs)' ./testdom.com_dump | grep -A1 "Content-Type"
2023:Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name="testdom.com.shtdocs"
3806:--_----------=_1163395694117660-----------------------------------------

“Increase the first line number on 2 and  subtract 1 from the second line number, then run:”

head -n 3805  ./testdom.com_dump | tail +2025  > htdocs.tar

At least with this method the site data was restored.  There wasn’t any mail to try and restore so that was fine.  Also, the previous restore had restored the databases before failing so didn’t need to extract those.