How to Back Up and Restore a Minecraft Server World
Oct 18, 2026
What a backup protects you from
Worlds get lost in boring ways: a crash that corrupts a region file, a griefer, a bad update, a drive that dies. A backup is a zipped copy of the world taken at a moment you can go back to. The one that matters is the one you made before you needed it.
Turn on automatic backups
Open the Backups page and set an interval in hours. Coalstack zips the world folders into a timestamped archive in the server's own backups folder. This is on every tier, including Free.
- Automatic backups run while Coalstack is open, whether or not the server is running. The scheduler checks every 15 minutes whether any server is due.
- If an automatic backup fails you get a notification, so you don't find out when you need to restore.
- A running Bedrock server doesn't have to be stopped. Coalstack asks it to hold its world still, copies the files it lists, then lets it carry on.
A sensible start is every few hours for a server people play daily, and once a day for one that is mostly idle.
Backups, snapshots and Back Up Now
Back Up Now takes a backup whenever you press it. A snapshot is the same thing, kept in a separate snapshots folder and limited to the 5 most recent. Use a snapshot as a quick save point before something risky, such as installing a batch of mods, and use backups for the long run.
Coalstack also takes one for you before it replaces a world. The backup labelled "Before import/reset" comes from importing or resetting a world.
Keep a copy off the computer
Every backup is always saved in the server's backups folder, which is on the same drive as the world. If that drive fails you lose both. Add a destination so each backup is also copied somewhere else:
- Free includes one extra destination: a local or mounted folder (an external drive, a NAS, a synced OneDrive folder) or Google Drive.
- Coalstack Plus has no limit and adds S3-compatible storage (Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 and similar).
If a destination is unavailable, for example a drive that is unplugged or a sign-in that expired, the local backup still succeeds and that destination is marked with a warning. Check the backup history now and then so that warning doesn't sit unnoticed.
How many to keep
Set a maximum number of backups to keep and Coalstack deletes the oldest ones beyond it each time a new backup is made. Zero or blank means unlimited, which is fine until the disk fills. Worlds can be large, so pick a number that fits the space you have.
Restoring a world
- Stop the server. A restore can't run while it is running.
- Back up the current world first with Back Up Now, even if it is the broken one. A restore replaces it, and a copy costs you nothing.
- Open the Backups page, find the backup by its date and size, and browse its contents if you aren't sure it is the right one.
- Restore it. Coalstack deletes the world folders the backup replaces and extracts the archive in their place.
- Start the server and check the world is what you expected.
A Bedrock restore replaces the world inside the backup and points the server's level-name at it. Only the active world is backed up on Bedrock.
More detail
The full reference is in Backups & Snapshots in the docs. If you are about to move to a newer Minecraft version, read how to update a server safely first.