Back up and restore your Minecraft server

Wispdock’s control panel isn’t built yet. Where a step says “in your control panel”, use whatever your host gives you for files, the console and start/stop. The Minecraft side works the same everywhere.

What to back up

Anything that would take you more than a few minutes to rebuild. On most servers that comes down to this:

• The world folders. The next section covers which ones, because the layout depends on your server software.
• server.properties, ops.json, whitelist.json, banned-players.json and banned-ips.json. Small files, and tedious to recreate by hand.
• On Paper and other plugin servers, the plugins folder. Each plugin keeps its config and data in its own subfolder: permission groups, homes, land claims, shop data. Add bukkit.yml, spigot.yml and the config folder, which holds Paper’s own settings.
• On modded servers, mods and config, plus defaultconfigs, kubejs or similar folders if the pack has them. Some Forge packs also keep per-world settings in world/serverconfig, which comes along with the world anyway.

If a plugin stores its data in MySQL or MariaDB instead of a local file, that data isn’t in the plugins folder at all. Back up the database separately, with the same timing as the world.

You can skip what the server downloads or rebuilds by itself: logs, crash-reports, cache, libraries, versions, and the server jar if you can download the same build again. Do write down the exact Minecraft version and the loader or Paper build, though. A world restored onto a different version is a second problem on top of the first.

Where the world actually lives

The world folder is named after level-name in server.properties, which is world unless someone changed it. What sits next to it depends on the software.

On Paper that is three folders. A backup with only world in it has no Nether and no End, and you find that out on the day you need it.

Inside a world folder, the parts that matter:

• level.dat: the seed, world spawn, game rules and time. Without it, the server doesn’t recognise the folder as a world.
• region: the terrain, in files named r.X.Z.mca. Each file covers 32 by 32 chunks, which is 512 by 512 blocks.
• entities: mobs, item frames, armor stands and other entities, in region files with the same names. Worlds from before 1.17 kept these inside the terrain files.
• poi: points of interest such as beds, villager workstations and Nether portals.
• playerdata: one <uuid>.dat file per player, holding their inventory, position and ender chest.
• data, advancements, stats and datapacks: maps, raids, scoreboards, player progress and any data packs the world uses.

For a backup, copy the whole folder. Picking single files out of it is for restores.

Copy a running world safely

The server keeps changed chunks in memory and writes them to disk in batches. Copy the folder halfway through that and you can get region files from two different moments, or one that is half written. Stopping the server first is the safest option. If you can’t, pause saving from the console:

save-off
save-all flush

save-off turns off automatic saving. save-all flush writes everything in memory to disk and waits until it’s finished. Wait for the console to say Saved the game before you start copying. Typed in game rather than in the console, the commands need a slash and op level 4.

Copy or zip the folders, then turn saving back on:

save-on

Don’t skip that last one. With saving off, nothing players build gets written to disk, and a crash or restart later throws all of it away.

Backup plugins and mods run the same sequence on a timer. If you use one, check where it writes the archives and how many it keeps, and make sure the answer isn’t “one, in the server folder”.

Zip it and keep a copy off the server

One archive is easier to move than a few thousand region files, and harder to half-copy. Most control panels can compress a selection of folders in the file manager. With shell access, from the server folder:

zip -r backup-2026-11-02.zip world world_nether world_the_end plugins config server.properties ops.json whitelist.json banned-players.json banned-ips.json

Leave out world_nether and world_the_end on vanilla or modded servers, and swap plugins for mods there. Put the date in the file name. When something breaks you’ll be choosing a backup by date, and backup-final-2.zip won’t help.

Then download it, or copy it to storage somewhere else. A backup on the same disk as the server disappears with the server, whether that is a dead drive, a closed account or a command run in the wrong folder. The usual rule is three copies, on two kinds of storage, with one somewhere else entirely. For a friend server, the server itself, a copy on your PC and one in cloud storage covers it.

Keep several generations. Griefing and corruption often go unnoticed for days, and by then yesterday’s backup has the damage in it too. A backup from right before a big change is worth keeping separately, such as before a Minecraft version update or a modpack update.

Restore a whole world

1. Stop the server in your control panel and wait until the console shows it has saved and stopped. Restoring into a running server doesn’t work: it overwrites your files the next time it saves.

2. Rename the current world folder instead of deleting it, for example to world-broken. If the backup turns out to be the wrong one, you can go back.

3. Upload the backup and unpack it so the folder has the same name as level-name in server.properties.

4. Check that level.dat sits directly inside that folder. Unzipping often leaves you with world/world/level.dat, and the server then quietly generates a new world next to your files.

5. On Paper, restore world_nether and world_the_end from the same backup, so all three dimensions come from the same moment. The same goes for plugins: a claims plugin restored from a different day than the world has claims that don’t match the terrain.

6. Start the server, join, and look around before you delete the renamed folder.

A few things turn a restore into a bigger mess:

• Loading a world in an older Minecraft version than the one that last saved it. Worlds upgrade in one direction only.
• Restoring a modded world without the same mods. Blocks and items from a missing mod are dropped when the chunks load, and once those chunks are saved again they stay gone.
• Moving a world between Paper and vanilla without moving the Nether and End folders to match. The table above shows both layouts.

Restore one player or one area

You don’t always need to roll back everything. If one player lost their items, or one base got blown up, restore only that part and leave everyone else’s progress alone.

One player’s inventory

Each player’s inventory, position and ender chest are stored in world/playerdata/<uuid>.dat. You’ll find the UUID in usercache.json, or in the log line UUID of player Steve is … from when they joined. With the server stopped, copy that one file from the backup over the current one. The player gets back exactly what they had at backup time, including where they were standing.

One area

Work out which region file holds the area: divide the block X and Z coordinates by 512 and round down. A base at X 1200, Z -300 is in r.2.-1.mca. With the server stopped, copy that file from the backup’s region folder into the world’s region folder. Copy the file with the same name from entities as well if you want the item frames, armor stands and animals back.

Everything else in that 512 by 512 block square goes back in time too, so check nobody else built there since the backup. For the Nether, the files are in DIM-1/region, which on Paper sits inside world_nether.

For damage smaller than a region, a block-logging plugin such as CoreProtect can roll back individual changes without touching your backups. It only covers what it logged, so it has to be installed before the damage happens.

Test that a backup works

A backup you have never restored is a guess. Every so often, take the latest one and open it somewhere that isn’t the live server.

For a vanilla, Fabric or Forge world, the quick test is to unzip it into the saves folder of your own game and open it in singleplayer, with the same version and mods. A Paper world needs one change first: move world_nether/DIM-1 and world_the_end/DIM1 into world, since singleplayer uses the vanilla layout. Or run a second server on your own PC with the backup and your plugins.

Check the parts you would miss: someone’s base, the Nether hub, the End. Open the archive and confirm playerdata and the plugin folders are in it. If the archive is far smaller than the world folder on the server, something didn’t get copied. If the server won’t start after a restore, the log says why, and reading server logs walks through finding the line that matters.

If you’d rather not do this by hand, the pricing page shows what Wispdock’s draft plans include; prices are drafts and ordering isn’t open yet.

Still stuck? Send us the details and your latest.log.