Backups and restores

Why you need backups

Things that wipe out a weekend of building:

A griefer with the wrong permissions.
A plugin or modpack update that removes blocks or breaks the world.
A crash while the world was saving, leaving corrupted chunks.
You. Everyone has run a command in the wrong place once.

A backup turns all of these into a ten-minute fix.

What to back up

Folder or file	Why
`world` (plus `world_nether` and `world_the_end` on Paper/Spigot)	The actual world
`plugins` or `mods` and `config`	Plugin data, homes, claims, economy, configs
`server.properties`	Your server settings
`whitelist.json`, `ops.json`, `banned-players.json`	Who can join and who is in charge

If plugins use a MySQL database (LuckPerms or CoreProtect can), that database needs its own backup. Copying the server folder does not include it.

How often

Active survival server: once a day at least.
Before any update of Minecraft, the modpack or a big plugin: always, manually.
Before big events like a world reset or a map change: always.

Keep more than one. If a griefer struck three days ago and nobody noticed, yesterday’s backup already contains the damage.

Making a clean backup by hand

Copying a world while the server writes to it can give you a broken copy. The safe way:

Run save-off in the console. The server stops writing to disk.
Run save-all flush. Everything in memory is written now.
Copy or zip the folders above. Download the zip via SFTP or your server panel’s file manager.
Run save-on.

The simplest alternative: stop the server, copy, start again.

Store at least one copy somewhere else — your PC, a cloud drive. A backup on the same disk as the server does not help if the disk fails.

Automatic backups

Doing this by hand every day does not last. Options:

Your host’s backup system. On ShulkerHost, backups run automatically and are restored from the panel.
A backup plugin or mod that zips the world on a schedule. Make sure it saves to a folder you actually download from time to time.

Restoring a world

Stop the server. Never restore while it runs.
Rename the current world folder to something like world-broken. Do not delete it yet.
Put the backup’s world folder in its place (and the nether and end folders on Paper/Spigot).
If the problem came from a plugin or mod update, restore the matching plugins or mods folder too.
Start the server and check the area that was damaged.
Once everything looks right, delete world-broken.

Players lose everything they did after the backup was taken. Tell them before you restore.

Restoring only a small area

Rolling back a whole world for one griefed house is overkill.

CoreProtect (Paper) logs block changes. /co rollback undoes a player’s changes in an area without touching anything else.
Tools like MCA Selector can copy single region files from a backup into the live world. Stop the server first.

Test your backups

Once a month, take a backup, start it as a local test server on your PC and walk around. If it loads, you are safe. If it does not, you found out on a quiet day instead of an emergency.

Moving to a new host is basically a backup and a restore on a different machine — see move your world to a new host. Before updating a pack, read install a modpack.