Backups & restores
How one-click and scheduled backups work, how to lock important ones, and how to restore.
Sapling backs up every server once a night and lets you take your own backups whenever you like. This page covers what a backup contains, how long automatic ones are kept, and how to restore.
Automatic backups
Every server gets an automatic backup once a night, in the early morning, Australian eastern time. Your server's Backups tab shows the exact time and how many automatic backups are kept.
- If people are playing when your server's turn comes, Sapling waits for it to empty, checking every few minutes for up to an hour, and then backs it up anyway.
- Where the game supports it, the world is saved just before the backup is taken.
- Once a server has more automatic backups than it keeps, the oldest automatic ones are removed. Backups you took yourself and backups you have locked are never removed this way.
Taking your own backup
Open the Backups tab, give the backup a name and click Create backup. You can also add a Take a backup action to a schedule on the Schedules tab. Your own backups stay until you delete them, but each server can only hold a limited number of backups in total, so delete ones you no longer need.
Locking a backup
Click the lock icon next to a backup to mark it Kept. A kept backup is never removed to make room for a newer automatic one. Click it again to unlock.
What a backup contains
A backup is a copy of your server's files: worlds and saves, configs, plugins, mods and logs. The game's own install files are left out, because they are downloaded again whenever the server needs them and would make every backup many times larger. What that means for a few games:
- Minecraft: worlds, plugins, mods and config files are kept; the server's libraries and version files are not.
- Counter-Strike 2: custom and workshop maps are not included. The Backups tab says so.
- Anything outside your server's files, such as an external database a plugin connects to, is not backed up.
Restoring
- Open the server's Backups tab.
- Find the backup you want and click Restore.
- Confirm. The backup's files are written over your server's current files.