Most people have backups. Far fewer have backups that survive the thing that destroys the original — because the backup lives in the same place, under the same account, reachable by the same mistake.
The rule
Three copies of anything you care about. On two different kinds of storage. At least one of them somewhere separate from the original. It is an old rule from long before Minecraft, and it survives because every part of it corresponds to a way people actually lose data.
What each copy protects against
| Copy | Survives |
|---|---|
| The live world | Nothing. This is the thing at risk. |
| A scheduled backup on the service | Corruption, a bad restore, a deleted world. |
| A downloaded copy on your machine | A compromised account, a cancelled service, a mistake by you. |
| A copy in your own cloud storage | Your machine failing, and everything above. |
If somebody logs in as you, or a service ends, the backups go with everything else. That is precisely the scenario people imagine backups protect them from, and it is the one an on-service backup does not cover. One downloaded copy fixes this entirely.
A routine that is realistic
- Daily automatic backups on the service
Scheduled, before your nightly restart. This is the one that catches the ordinary accidents.
- A monthly download
Once a month, download the current backup to your own machine. Set a reminder; it is exactly the kind of task that gets skipped when it is optional.
- Keep the last few, not all of them
Yesterday, last week, last month. Three points in time catch a problem you noticed late, and cost far less space than keeping everything.
- Test a restore once
Restore one into a test instance and walk around. An untested backup is a hope. This is the step nobody does and the one that turns out to matter.
Plugin configs, permissions data and a database export are the parts that took the longest to set up. The world can be rebuilt from a copy; a year of tuned configuration cannot be rebuilt from memory.
You have a copy on your own machine dated within the last month, you have opened it to confirm the world is inside, and you have restored one at least once.