Backups and schedules for your Minecraft server

Why back up

Things go wrong on every Minecraft server sooner or later. A plugin update breaks something, a mod corrupts a chunk, someone griefs your spawn, or you delete the wrong folder.

You might have heard that our storage is mirrored. It is: your files are written to two NVMe drives (RAID 1), so one drive failing doesn't lose them. But a mirror is not a backup. If a file is deleted or a world gets corrupted, that change happens on both drives at once. Only a backup lets you go back to how things were before.

Make a backup:

• Before updating Minecraft, your server software, plugins or mods.
• Before installing a new modpack or a big plugin.
• Before pre-generating the world or making large edits.
• Regularly, even when nothing is changing.

Make a backup

1. Open your server in the panel and go to the Backups page.
2. Create a new backup. You can give it a name, like "before 1.21 update", so you know what it is later.
3. Wait for it to finish before you start making changes.

For the cleanest backup, stop the server first, or run save-all in the console so the world is written to disk. Backing up a running server usually works, but a world that's mid-save can leave a chunk or two out of date.

If your server has big folders that don't need backing up (like old logs or a dynmap render), the panel supports a .pteroignore file: put it in your main server folder and list the files or folders to skip, using the same format as a .gitignore. Leaving them out makes backups faster and smaller.

Restore safely

Restoring replaces your current files with the ones in the backup, so anything that changed since then is lost. Before you restore:

1. Stop the server.
2. Think about what you'll lose. Builds and progress since the backup was made will be gone.
3. If you have a free slot, make a backup of the current state first. Then if the restore doesn't fix the problem, you can go back.

Then restore the backup from the Backups page in the panel, and start the server once it's done. Join and check the world and your plugins or mods look right before you tell everyone it's back.

You can also download a backup from the panel and pull out just one file or folder, like a single player's data or a plugin's config, and upload it back on the Files page. That's handy when only one thing is broken.

Backup slots per plan

Each plan comes with a fixed number of backup slots:

• 5 backup slots on Shard, Shard+, Shard++ and Shard+++.
• 10 backup slots on Shard Pro, Shard Pro+, Shard Ultra and Shard Max.

Each slot holds one backup. What happens when they're all full depends on how the backup is made:

• Manual backups fail once you're at the limit. Delete an old backup first, then make the new one.
• Scheduled backups delete your oldest unlocked backup to make room for the new one.

To keep an important backup from being rotated out, lock it in the panel. Locked backups aren't deleted by scheduled backups. Backups also take time and space to make, so a huge world means slower backups.

A simple way to use your slots: keep one or two recent regular backups, one from before your last big change, and one older "known good" copy you don't delete until you're sure you won't need it.

We can't guarantee every file or restore point can be recovered, so don't treat the panel's backups as your only copy.

Create a nightly restart schedule

Restarting your server once a day clears out memory, reloads plugins cleanly and keeps long-running servers feeling fresh. Pterodactyl lets you automate this with schedules in the panel.

A schedule is made of two parts: when it runs, and the tasks it runs.

1. In the panel, open the Schedules page and create a new schedule. Give it a name like "Nightly restart".
2. Set when it runs. Pterodactyl uses cron-style fields for minute, hour, day of the month, month and day of the week. For once a night, set the minute and hour you want (for example, minute 0 and hour 4), and leave the other fields as * so it runs every day.
3. Pick a time when few people are online. Panel schedules run on Istanbul time (UTC+3), so if you live in another timezone, convert your chosen time before you enter it.
4. Add tasks: - Send command: say Server restarting in 5 minutes to warn players. - Send command again a few minutes later (tasks can have a time offset from the one before): say Restarting now, then save-all. - Power action: restart, with a short offset after the save.
5. Save the schedule and make sure it's enabled.

You can also add a create backup task to a schedule, for example once a night before the restart. Each run uses a backup slot, and once your slots are full it deletes the oldest unlocked backup. Lock any backup you want to keep.

Test your schedule once by running it manually, or set it a few minutes ahead and watch the console, so you know it works before you rely on it.

Keep your own off-site copy

Your plan's backups live with your server. For anything you'd be really upset to lose, keep a copy somewhere else too.

• Download a backup from the panel now and then, especially after big builds or before major updates.
• Or download your world folder over SFTP with a client like FileZilla or WinSCP.
• Store it somewhere that isn't the server: your own computer, an external drive or a cloud storage service.
• Keep more than one, so a bad copy doesn't leave you with nothing.

It takes a few minutes and means your world survives anything that happens to the server. Remember that after your service ends, files and backups are deleted after a short period, so download what you want to keep before you cancel. Section 6 of our Refund & Cancellation Policy explains what happens to your files.

Next steps

Now that your world is protected, see how to fix Minecraft server lag or set up a modpack server. Need more backup slots? The larger plans include 10.