This morning, 5/23/11, I went to bring the latest backup from www.AgingSafely.com down to my local server for upgrading of modules and testing. Much to my surprise there was a new version of the Plesk control panel that has been in use for a week. Everything had moved! After a bit of wondering around I was able to find most of the functions that I normally use.

There is some significant lose of functionality:
1. You can't see any of the "old format" backups
2. You can't see any of the "new format" nightly backups that PowerDNN may have created
3. Backups are now XML files rather than ZIP files.
4. PowerDNN can restore them on their servers, but can't tell you how to restore them on your localhost.

Item 4 seems like a real killer for customers like me who aren't brave or stupid enough to install upgrades on their production site without some level of local testing first.

PowerDNN's support staff was nice enough to offer to create an old-style backup and place it in my "private ftp" area. I don't see how they can continue to do this for a significant number of customers for very long.

If anyone else who uses PowerDNN has any solutions please share them.

Hi Dave,
Thanks for posting. Parallels certainly did move everything around, but we felt that it was worth it in order to roll out .NET 4.0 to our customers. We're getting ready for DNN6.0 in a big way and we want to be able to give our customers the latest and greatest platform (DNN6 on .NET4).

Regarding site-level backups - Yes, Parallels did change a lot of stuff in that area. While the old backups can not be downloaded through the control panel, we can still provide them to you if you need one.

Regarding restoring the site locally, we'll be publishing an update to our knowledgebase later on this week that explains Parallel's new backup format and what you need to do to restore locally. It isn't really that hard, it is just structured different from what it used to be.

I'll keep you posted.