By Paul Tero CHAPTER 8Both tar and zip strip the leading slashes when they backup. So when
you restore the files, they will be restored within the current directory. To
restore them in the same location they were backed up from, first restore
them in the current directory and then move them into place with mv.
$ tar xfzv backupfile.tgz
var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs/...
The “v” above stands for verbose and causes tar to show what it’s doing.
zip has a similar option:
$ unzip -v backupfile.zip
Archive: backupfile.zip
Length Method Size Cmpr Date Time CRC-32 Name
0 Stored 0 0% 2012-05-28 00:33 00000000 var/www/vhosts/
smashingmagazine.com/httpdocs/...
Website Errors
Let’s assume your website hasn’t actually disappeared. The next place to
look is the error log file.
finDing The log file
When using a server management package like Plesk, each website
probably has its own log file. You can find it by grepping for the word “log”
in the conf file you identified above. The -i means case-insensitive.
$ grep -i log /var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/conf/last_httpd.include
CustomLog /var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/statistics/logs/ac-
cess_log plesklog
ErrorLog "/var/www/vhosts/smashingmagazine.com/statistics/logs/er-
ror_log"...
There is also a server-wide log where any non-website-specific errors go.
You can find this in the main conf file: