The Problem With All-or-Nothing Restore
Panelica's granular restore lets you browse into any backup and pull out exactly one file, folder, database, or mailbox — with a live SHA-256 preview to confirm what changed — instead of rolling back an entire domain to recover something small. It works on both full and incremental backups, and every overwrite is preceded by an automatic safety copy of whatever it replaces.
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. The browser works the same way whether the backup is a full snapshot or an incremental one built on a chain of earlier backups — it reads whichever index format the backup actually stores.
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: open the preview, see the checksum flagged as different, glance at the diff in the text view, and restore with confidence instead of guessing.
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.
A Real Scenario: A Tampered wp-config.php
A site starts behaving strangely — unexpected redirects, an admin account nobody created. Instead of restoring the whole domain and losing today's legitimate orders or comments, granular restore lets you go straight to the suspect file:
- Open the backup from before the site was compromised and browse to
wp-config.php. - Preview it. The SHA-256 comparison flags the live file as different from the backup — confirmation that something changed it.
- Restore just that one file, keeping the rest of the domain, its database, and today's uploads exactly as they are.
- The previous (compromised) file is saved to a safety copy automatically, in case you need to inspect it further or hand it to whoever is investigating.
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.
Granular Restore vs. a Full Domain Restore
| Full Domain Restore | Granular Restore | |
|---|---|---|
| What comes back | Every file, database, and mailbox on the domain | Only the file, folder, database, or mailbox you pick |
| What you risk losing | Anything changed since the backup was taken | Nothing outside what you chose to restore |
| Preview before restoring | Not applicable — it is all or nothing | SHA-256 checksum comparison against the live version |
| Safety copy of what is replaced | Depends on workflow | Automatic, every time |
| Works on incremental backups | Yes | Yes |
This kind of side-by-side preview and live checksum comparison before a restore is not something you will find in most backup tools bundled with a hosting panel — the usual choice is between a full restore or manually extracting an archive by hand to find the one file you actually need. To see how the surrounding backup system handles scheduling, retention, and full-server recovery, see our complete guide to backups, restores, and snapshots, or, if you are coming from a JetBackup or Plesk background, the backup tooling comparison. Database-specific recovery, including manual mysqldump workflows, is covered in our MySQL backup and restore guide.
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. If the domain-level problem turns out to be something else entirely — a misconfigured service rather than bad data — the Repair Tool is the faster path.
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.
Does granular restore work on incremental backups?
Yes. It reads whichever backup index the file was stored with, so browsing and restoring work the same way on a full backup or an incremental one.
Is there a limit on how many granular restores I can run?
Granular restores are rate-limited separately from full restores, since single-file recoveries are typically small and frequent rather than rare and heavy.