Minecraft server backups and uploading your world

Your Minecraft world is backed up for you: a safe copy is made every time the server goes to sleep, and every 10 minutes while it runs. You can also make, restore and download backups in Backups, and upload a world from single player in Games > Bring your world.

How backups work

• Automatic safe copies: each time the server sleeps, and every 10 minutes while it runs and the world has changed.
• Before risky steps: we make one before switching games, restoring, updating and installing mods. These are kept for 7 days.
• By hand: press the backup button in Backups and give it a name, like “before the dragon fight”.
• On a schedule: open Schedules and use the Backup every 6 hours preset, or make your own.

Backups hold your world, configs, mods and plugins. They never hold the game’s own files, which install from Mojang.

Restore a backup

1. Open Backups.
2. Pick the backup by its date or name.
3. Choose restore and confirm.

We back up the world as it is now before we restore, so you can undo a restore too. To get back one file, such as server.properties from yesterday, open it in Files and pick an earlier version.

Download a backup

Open Backups, pick one and choose download. You get a link to a zip that works for 24 hours. The zip holds the world folder, so you can open it in single player or move it to another server.

Where the world lives on the server

The folder name comes from level-name in server.properties. While the server runs, the panel marks these folders as in use. Stop the server before you change them, because the game rewrites files it has open.

Bring your single-player world

Find your world on your device, zip it, and upload it in Games > Bring your world. We check that it looks like a world for that edition before it goes live.

Java on Windows, Mac and Linux

Worlds are in the saves folder of your game folder. Each world is a folder with the name you gave it.

You can also open it from the game: Singleplayer, select the world, Edit, then Open World Folder.

Played with a launcher like the CurseForge app, Modrinth App or Prism Launcher? Each pack has its own folder. Use the launcher’s button to open the instance or profile folder, then look in saves.

To make the zip, right-click the world folder and choose to compress it to a zip file (on a Mac, choose Compress). Zip the world folder itself, the one that holds level.dat.

Bedrock on Windows

The quickest way is the game’s own export: open the world’s settings, scroll down and choose Export World. You get a .mcworld file.

To find the world folder instead:

1. Press Windows + R, type %appdata% and press Enter.
2. Open Minecraft Bedrock, then Users, then the folder with a long number.
3. Open games, then com.mojang, then minecraftWorlds.

Each world has a short random folder name, like eplC8tYRD04=. Open levelname.txt inside to see which world it is. Zip that folder.

Older copies of the game kept worlds under %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftWorlds. The game moved them in version 1.21.120.

Bedrock on phones and tablets

Use Export World at the bottom of the world’s settings, where your device shows it. It saves a .mcworld file you can send to your PC or upload from the phone. Some Android versions of the game don’t show this button.

A .mcworld file is a zip with a different ending. If the upload asks for a zip, rename the end of the file name from .mcworld to .zip.

Bedrock on Xbox, PlayStation and Switch

Consoles can’t export a world to a file. If you have a Realm, one route is to copy the world to your Realm on the console, then download it from the Realm on a PC or phone and export it there. Menu names can differ by version.

Move a world from another host

1. On the old host, stop the server and download the world folders as a zip. For Java, that is world, plus world_nether and world_the_end if they exist. For Bedrock, it is the world folder inside worlds.
2. Upload the zip in Games > Bring your world.
3. Copy over anything else you want to keep, such as whitelist.json, ops.json and your plugins or mods folders, through Files.
4. Set the same Server type and Game version in Settings before the first start.

Realm owners can download their Realm’s world in the game: on Java from the Realm’s backups screen, on Bedrock from the Realm’s world settings.

Moving a Paper world to Vanilla on 1.21.11 or older? Paper keeps the Nether and the End in their own folders. Before you upload, move world_nether/DIM-1 into world as world/DIM-1, and world_the_end/DIM1 into world as world/DIM1. On 26.1 and later every server type uses the same layout, so there is nothing to move.

Edition switches don’t carry worlds

A Java world can’t run on a Bedrock server, and a Bedrock world can’t run on a Java server. If you want both groups in one world, make a Java server with the Bedrock addition.