How to Back Up and Restore Your Minecraft Server

A Minecraft world can take months to build and a few seconds to lose. A broken plugin update, a corrupted chunk, a griefer with too many permissions or a version upgrade that goes wrong can wipe out everything your players made.

The fix is not complicated: take backups, keep more than one, and make sure you can actually restore them. In this guide, we will cover which files to back up, how to copy a running server safely, how often to back up, where to keep your copies, how to restore step by step and how to test a backup.

By the end of this guide, you will know exactly what a good backup looks like and how to get your server back after something breaks.

What to Back Up

The world is the most important part, but your settings and plugin data can take hours to redo too. A good backup has all three.

The world folder

Your world lives in the folder named by level-name in server.properties. By default that is world. Where the Nether and the End are stored depends on your server software and version, because Minecraft 26.1 changed the world layout.

Server software	Where the dimensions are
Vanilla 26.1 and newer	One world folder, with each dimension in world/dimensions/minecraft/ (overworld, the_nether, the_end)
Paper 26.1 and newer	Same as vanilla: one world folder with a dimensions folder inside
Vanilla before 26.1	One world folder, with the Nether in world/DIM-1 and the End in world/DIM1
Paper and Spigot before 26.1	Three folders: world, world_nether and world_the_end

Sources: Paper 26.1 release notes, Minecraft Wiki: level format.

Not sure which one you have? Look at your server's main folder. If you see world_nether and world_the_end next to world, back up all three.

Warning: A world upgraded to 26.1 or newer cannot be opened in an older version again. Paper's own release notes call backups "absolutely mandatory" before upgrading. Read Should Your Server Run the Latest Minecraft Release? before you jump.

Plugins, mods and their data

• plugins/: the plugin jars plus each plugin's data folder. LuckPerms, for example, keeps its permissions in an H2 database file inside plugins/LuckPerms unless you change it (source).
• mods/ and config/ on Fabric, Forge and NeoForge servers, plus any other folders your modpack added.
• MySQL databases. If you switched a plugin to MySQL, its data is not inside your server files, so a file backup does not include it. Export the database separately.

Settings and player lists

• server.properties
• ops.json, whitelist.json, banned-players.json and banned-ips.json
• On Paper: bukkit.yml, spigot.yml and the config folder (paper-global.yml, paper-world-defaults.yml)
• Your start script if you host at home, for example start.bat

You can usually skip logs/, crash-reports/, cache/, libraries/ and the server jar, since those can be downloaded or recreated. Map tiles from plugins like Dynmap or BlueMap can also be skipped if they are large, because they can be rendered again.

Save the World Before You Copy It

A running server keeps recent changes in memory and writes chunks to disk over time. If you copy the world while a region file is half written, your backup can contain a broken chunk.

The safest option is to stop the server, copy the files, then start it again.

If you want to back up while players are online, use these console commands first (they need op level 4, or the console):

save-off
save-all flush
(copy your files now)
save-on

• save-off stops the server from writing world files. Changes are queued instead.
• save-all flush writes everything to disk right now. The server can freeze for a moment.
• save-on turns saving back on. Don't forget it: until you run it or restart, world changes stay queued in memory, and a crash would lose them.

Source: Minecraft Wiki: save commands.

At home on Linux, a simple archive of a Paper server after those commands looks like this (world* also catches world_nether and world_the_end on the old layout):

tar -czf backup-$(date +%F).tar.gz world* plugins config server.properties *.json *.yml

On Windows, right-click the folders and compress them to a ZIP with the date in the name.

How Often to Back Up

The right answer is "as often as the progress you can afford to lose". These are common starting points, not rules:

• Small private server, a few sessions a week → once a day, or after every session
• Active community server → several times a day
• Any server → right before updating Minecraft, switching server software, updating plugins or running big WorldEdit or Chunky trim jobs

Keep several backups, not just the newest one. A corrupted chunk or a hidden grief can go unnoticed for days, and by then your latest backups contain the damage too. Keeping a week of daily backups plus a few older ones is a sensible pattern.

Keep a Copy Somewhere Else

A popular rule is 3-2-1: keep three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy off-site (source).

For a Minecraft server, that can be as simple as:

• Copy 1: the live server
• Copy 2: backups stored by your host or panel
• Copy 3: a download on your PC, an external drive or a cloud drive

A backup stored on the same machine as the server is lost together with it if the disk fails or the account is gone. Download an important backup now and then, especially before big changes.

Name backups so you know what they are. "before-26.3-update" is much more useful than "Backup 14" when something goes wrong.

How to Restore a Backup

1. Stop the server.
2. Copy the current files somewhere safe, even if they are broken. You might need something from them later.
3. Delete or rename the current world folder (all three if you use the old Paper layout). Don't extract the backup on top of it: chunks generated after the backup would stay and get mixed into the old world.
4. Extract the backup so the folder names match level-name and your server's layout.
5. Restore plugins/, configs or databases too if the problem was there.
6. Start the server and watch the console for errors.
7. Log in and check spawn, a few bases and the Nether, then tell your players what time the backup is from.

If only one plugin broke, you don't need to roll back the world. Stop the server and replace just that plugin's folder inside plugins/.

For grief in one area, a full restore is often overkill. A rollback plugin like CoreProtect can undo one player's changes. See How to Protect Your Minecraft Server from Griefers and Attacks.

Test Your Backups

A backup you have never restored is a guess. Test one now and then, and every time you change how you take them.

• Download a backup and open the archive. Check that level.dat and the region folders are there and that the size looks right.
• Restore it on a test server, on your PC or a second free server, and walk around.
• For a vanilla world, you can copy the world folder into your .minecraft/saves folder and open it in singleplayer with the same game version.

Backups on EternalZero

On EternalZero, the server's Backups page does most of this for you. You can create a backup with a name, skip folders you don't need (like logs/), download it, restore it and delete it. When restoring, you can choose to delete all files first, which gives you the clean restore from step 3. The server restarts when the restore is done.

Each server has a backup limit, shown next to the list. When you reach it, delete an old backup before making a new one by hand. Lock a backup to protect it: a locked backup cannot be deleted, and when a scheduled backup needs room at the limit, the oldest unlocked backup is removed instead. Lock your known good copy before a big update.

If Google Drive backups are turned on, you can connect your own Drive and send backups there. That is your off-site copy.

To automate it, open Schedules, set the timing and add tasks, for example:

1. Send a command: save-all
2. Create a backup, with a short delay such as 30 seconds after the first task

Wrapping Up

Start simple: one automatic backup a day, one locked copy you know is good, and one copy off the server. Back up again before every update, and restore a backup once so you know it works.

When that is in place, the worst day on your server becomes a short rollback instead of a lost world. Next, read Whitelist, Ops and Permissions to make sure fewer things go wrong in the first place.