Most servers have backups and most of those backups have never been opened. A routine is worth having only if it survives the situations that actually happen, and there are only three of those.
The three things you are protecting against
| What happens | What saves you |
|---|---|
| A plugin or a player destroys something | A recent backup — hours old is fine. |
| A world corrupts or an upgrade goes wrong | A backup from before the change, which means naming them by reason. |
| The service ends: unpaid invoice, mistake, anything | A copy on your own machine. Nothing stored on the server survives this one. |
The routine
- Schedule a daily automatic backup
The panel can run it on a schedule. Pick an hour when nobody is playing so the world is quiet when it is copied.
- Take a manual one before anything risky
Version changes, mod updates, large WorldEdit operations. Name it after the thing you are about to do.
- Download one every week or so
This is the step that covers the third row of the table, and it is the one everybody skips.
Pick a quiet moment, restore your most recent backup onto the server, and check the world opens. Finding out your backups are unreadable is much better on a Tuesday afternoon than during an emergency.
They are stored with everything else, so a stack of old ones can fill the plan and cause the very failure they were meant to prevent. Download and prune.