The Problem With All-or-Nothing Restore
A backup restore in most panels is a blunt instrument: pick a backup, restore it, and everything on that domain reverts to that point in time — including the parts that were fine. That is a heavy price to pay for recovering one deleted file, one corrupted table, or one mailbox that got wiped by a bad script.
Panelica's granular restore lets you reach into a backup and pull out exactly what you need — a single file, a folder, one database, or one mailbox — while leaving everything else on the live site untouched.
What It Does
Browse a Backup Like a File System
Every backup can be opened and browsed by domain, folder by folder, with a search box to jump straight to a filename. Large backups use an index cache, so browsing stays fast even on multi-gigabyte archives.
Preview Before You Restore
Select any file inside the backup and preview its content — text, image, or binary — without extracting it. Panelica compares the backed-up version against the live file using SHA-256 checksums and flags whether the two are identical, different, or the live file is missing entirely. This is what lets you confirm, for example, that a wp-config.php file was tampered with before you restore the clean version over it.
Restore Exactly What You Need
- Files and folders — restore a single path with a choice to overwrite the live version or keep both copies.
- Databases — list every database contained in a backup and restore just one of them.
- Mailboxes — list every mailbox account in a backup and restore just one mailbox's messages.
Automatic Safety Copy
Before any granular restore overwrites something live, Panelica automatically copies the current version — file, database, or mailbox — to a trash location first. If the restore was not what you needed after all, the previous state is still there.
How to Use It
- Open the Backups section of your Panelica panel.
- Pick the backup you want to recover from and click Browse files.
- Choose a domain, then navigate folders or use the search box to find the file you need — or switch to the Databases or Mailboxes tab.
- Click the preview icon on a file to check its content and see whether it is identical to, different from, or missing on the live site.
- Click Restore on the file, folder, database, or mailbox you need.
- If a live version already exists, choose to overwrite it or keep both copies.
- Panelica saves a safety copy of whatever gets replaced before the restore runs.
Why It Matters
Granular restore turns backup recovery from a full-site rollback into a surgical fix. A defaced page, a dropped table, a deleted mailbox — each of these no longer means restoring an entire domain over content that was working fine. And because ownership-scoped access applies here the same as everywhere else in Panelica, account owners can browse, preview, and restore their own backups directly — a support ticket for "please restore this one file" is no longer necessary.
Get it now: granular restore is available on the latest Panelica release. Update your panel, open the Backups section, and use Browse files on any existing backup to try it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a full restore to get one file back?
No. Panelica's granular restore lets you pull a single file, folder, database, or mailbox out of a backup without touching the rest of the domain.
What happens to the current version when I restore over it?
Panelica automatically saves a safety copy of the file, database, or mailbox being replaced before the restore runs.
Can I see what changed before restoring?
Yes. The file preview compares the backed-up version against the live version using SHA-256 checksums and shows whether they are identical, different, or missing.