Backing Up and Restoring Your Game Server

Why this cannot wait

Most server owners take their first backup the day after they needed one. A backup costs you ten minutes today. Losing a world costs you your players.

You need a backup before you:

• install or update plugins and mods
• switch server software or game version
• edit configuration files
• wipe or reset anything at all
• open the server up to a larger group

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Step 1 - Stop the server first

A running server keeps the world in memory and writes it to disk continuously. Copy the files in the middle of that and you can end up with half a world.

1. Log in to the Potionhost control panel.
2. Stop the server and wait until it is fully down.
3. Only then take your backup.

Cannot stop the server? On Minecraft you can at least run save-all and save-off in the console, take the copy, and run save-on afterwards. That is an emergency measure, not a habit.

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Step 2 - Take the copy

You have two routes:

Through the control panel: compress the relevant folders as a .zip under Files and download the file to your own computer. That is the easiest method.

Over SFTP: faster and more reliable on large servers. Use something like FileZilla or WinSCP with the details from the control panel.

A backup that only exists on the server is not a backup. If the server is lost, the copy goes with it. Download it locally, or put it in cloud storage.

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Step 3 - Include the right things

The rule is the same for every game: take everything that cannot be downloaded again. The game files themselves can always be reinstalled - your world and your settings cannot.

Game	Include
Minecraft	The world folders (world, world_nether, world_the_end), plugins/ or mods/, server.properties, ops.json, whitelist.json, banned-players.json
Rust	All of server/IDENTITY/ including cfg/, plus oxide/ or carbon/
Palworld	Pal/Saved/SaveGames/ and Pal/Saved/Config/LinuxServer/PalWorldSettings.ini
ARK	ShooterGame/Saved/SavedArks/ and ShooterGame/Saved/Config/
Counter-Strike 2	game/csgo/cfg/ and game/csgo/addons/
Garry's Mod	garrysmod/data/, garrysmod/addons/, garrysmod/cfg/ and any database
FiveM	resources/, server.cfg, txData/ and your MySQL database
Terraria	Worlds/ (both .wld and .twld), Mods/ and serverconfig.txt

Databases are always forgotten. If your server uses MySQL or MariaDB - for an economy plugin or a FiveM framework, for instance - the files on disk are not enough. Export the database separately.

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Step 4 - Name and store them properly

A folder with twelve files called backup.zip, backup2.zip and backup_new.zip is not a backup strategy.

• Put the date in the filename: minecraft-world-2026-08-23.zip
• Note why you took it if it was before a major change: rust-before-oxide-update-2026-08-23.zip
• Keep several generations. The newest backup is not always the usable one - problems are often discovered days after they happened
• A simple rule of thumb: the last day, the last week, the last month

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Step 5 - How to restore

1. Stop the server.
2. Move the current files aside instead of deleting them - rename world to world_old, for instance. Then you can undo it if the backup turns out to be the wrong one.
3. Upload your backup and extract it in the same place it was taken from.
4. Check that the folder names match your settings - on Minecraft, level-name in server.properties must match the world folder.
5. Start the server and watch Console during startup.
6. Join the server and confirm it really is the version you expected to get back.

Never delete the old files until you have confirmed the restored version works.

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Test your backup

A backup you have never tried to restore is a promise, not a safeguard. Try it at least once:

• Extract the zip locally and check the contents look right
• On Minecraft you can drop the world folder into your own singleplayer saves and open it
• Check the file size makes sense. A 40 KB world folder is empty

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Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
The backup is empty or far too small	Copied from the wrong folder	Find the right path in the table above
The world is a few days old after restoring	The backup predates the last changes	Try a newer generation
The server starts but the world is new	Folder name does not match the setting	Correct level-name or rename the folder
The files were overwritten again	The server was running during the restore	Stop the server, restore again, start
Plugins do not work after restoring	Only the world was included, not plugins/	Restore the plugin folder and its configs too
Player data is missing	The database was not exported	Restore the database separately

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Good advice

• Take a backup before every change, not after.
• Automate what you can, but check occasionally that the files are actually being written.
• Always keep a copy locally.
• Write down what the backup contains. In six months you will not remember.
• If you run plugins that store data continuously, run their own save command before stopping the server.

Lost something and unsure what can be saved? Contact our support as soon as possible - the sooner we hear from you, the more options there are.