How to manually locate and extract a file or directory from a cPanel backup

Introduction

Users may want a specific file or folder extracted from a cPanel-generated backup. This article provides the steps to do this.

Procedure

Please note that in our examples, we will use the following information. You must replace our values with your backup file location, content to extract, and temporary directory.

• Backup file location: /backup/2020-08-16/accounts/cptest.tar.gz
• Directory to extract: public_html
• Temporary directory: /temp_location

1. Access the server's command line as the 'root' user via SSH or "Terminal" in WHM.
2. Use the tar tfz command with the grep command to locate the path to the file or folder to extract.

   [root@server ~]cPs# tar tfz /backup/2020-08-16/accounts/cptest.tar.gz | grep public_html | grep -v .cpanel | head -1
   cptest/homedir/public_html/

3. Create a directory in which to place the data.

   mkdir /temp_location

4. Change to the new directory.

   cd /temp_location/

5. Use the tar xfvz command to extract the directory from the backup file.

   tar xfvz /backup/2020-08-16/accounts/cptest.tar.gz cptest/homedir/public_html

   Please note that "cptest/homedir/public_html" must be replaced with the path located with the tar tfz command.
6. Use the ls command to verify that the desired content was extracted.

   ls -lah cptest/homedir/public_html/