GUIDE

Automatic Minecraft server backups

Schedule world backups on your own machine, check every file against its checksum, keep the ones that matter and restore a server in a few clicks.

A world can be lost to a corrupted chunk, a bad plugin update, a griefer or a failing disk. MineOps makes backups on a schedule, checks them, and tells you in Discord or Slack when one fails, so the backup you need is there when you need it. Backups and restores are part of the Plus, Network and Business plans.

Where your backups live

The agent makes each backup on your own machine, as a .tar.gz archive in the server's backup folder. Your worlds never pass through MineOps: it keeps only each backup's size, checksum and verification result.

How a backup is made

• While a Java Edition server runs, the agent pauses world saving, flushes the worlds to disk, archives the worlds and the server's configuration, and turns saving back on. Players keep playing.
• A running Bedrock server MineOps hosts is backed up live too, with Bedrock's own save hold. Hytale, Folia and Bedrock servers MineOps did not create are backed up while stopped.
• Each backup is then read again and every file checked against its SHA-256 checksum, so a backup marked verified is one you can restore.
• The agent keeps checking that the backup folder can take the next backup: that it can be written and the disk is not nearly full. The backups section warns you before a backup would fail.

Schedule them

Under Automation, a schedule runs a backup at the minute, hour and weekdays you choose, on your own time zone. The player history shows each server's quietest hour, a good time for it. Retention keeps the newest backups and removes older ones; pin a backup to keep it for good, such as the one from before a big update.

Add the Backup failed and Backup overdue alerts so a silent failure cannot go unnoticed for days. See Discord alerts.

Restore a server

1. Stop the server. A restore is refused while it runs.
2. Choose Restore on a backup and type the server's folder name to confirm.
3. The agent first backs up the current worlds, then restores the one you chose. If anything fails part way, even a crash, it puts everything back as it was.

Restoring from the dashboard is for servers MineOps creates, because it needs to write their worlds. Backups of servers you already ran are ordinary archives on your machine that you can unpack yourself.

Keep a copy somewhere else

A backup on the same disk does not survive losing that disk. Copy the backup folder to another machine or to object storage with the tools you already use. The archives hold server.properties, including the RCON password, so keep the copies private.