Windrose is in Early Access. Things break. Mods corrupt saves, a bad config change nukes your world state, the game patches in a way that mangles data – any of these can happen, and all of them are recoverable if you've been backing up. If you haven't, well, that's a different conversation.
Let me walk through the right way to back up and restore a Windrose server, including the one rule that sounds obvious but still catches people: never restore to a running server.
What Actually Needs Backing Up
The stuff you care about lives in one place:
R5/Saved/SaveProfiles/Default/RocksDB/<game-version>/Worlds/
That's where world data, structures, player inventories, quest progress – all of it – is stored. Each world is a folder, each folder is a RocksDB database. Back up the Worlds/ directory and you've got everything that matters.
The server installation files themselves (R5/Binaries/, R5/Content/, etc.) don't need backing up – you can always reinstall those via SteamCMD or Steam Update in the panel. Don't waste storage on them.
You also want R5/ServerDescription.json included in your backups. It's tiny but it holds your server name, password, player cap, and the current WorldIslandId that ties everything together. If you restore worlds but not this file, you might end up with a save that the server can't figure out how to load.
Cloud Backup (The Easy Path)
The LOW.MS Control Panel includes Cloud Backup in the sidebar. This is the path of least resistance:
- Open your Windrose service.
- Click Cloud Backup in the sidebar.
- Run a backup.
That's it. It snapshots your server's state to LOW.MS-managed storage, and you can restore from it via Cloud Restore whenever you need. The backup includes the world saves and the relevant config files.
I'd recommend setting up a scheduled backup via Scheduled Tasks so you're not relying on remembering to do it manually. Daily at an off-hour (say, 4 AM local time) works for most groups.
Manual Backup (If You're Paranoid)
For the belt-and-braces crowd, you can also pull a manual backup via SFTP. SFTP access is available on port 8822 – connection details are in Service Settings. Connect with WinSCP, FileZilla, or whatever SFTP client you like, and download:
R5/Saved/SaveProfiles/Default/RocksDB/<game-version>/Worlds/
R5/ServerDescription.json
Stash that zip somewhere safe. This gives you a local copy you can inspect, archive, or restore manually if Cloud Restore is unavailable for some reason.
For larger worlds, SFTP is meaningfully faster than the browser-based File Manager for these bulk downloads. Use it if your world folder is more than around 100 MB.
The Rule: Never Restore to a Running Server
Here's the one that gets people. Stop the server before restoring. Every time.
Windrose holds world state in memory while the server is running, and it writes back to disk on graceful shutdown. If you overwrite the world files while the server is running, you've now got two copies of truth – the in-memory state (from before your restore) and the on-disk state (the restored files). When the server next shuts down, it'll write its in-memory state back to disk, overwriting your restore. Worse, if the files are being written to actively as you upload your restore, you can end up with corrupted RocksDB files that are partially old and partially new.
The right sequence is always:
- Stop the server and wait for it to fully shut down.
- Restore from Cloud Restore (or upload your manual backup via SFTP/File Manager).
- Start the server.
Any other order invites corruption. I've had support tickets where someone restored a backup to a running server, thought it worked because the world loaded, and then found out the next day that half their data was from before the restore and half from after. Recovering from that is a much bigger headache than just stopping for 30 seconds before restoring.
Restore Procedure
Using Cloud Restore:
- Stop the server.
- Open Cloud Restore in the sidebar.
- Pick the backup you want to restore from.
- Confirm and wait for the restore to complete.
- Start the server.
- Connect and verify your world is where you expected it.
Using a manual SFTP backup:
- Stop the server.
- Connect via SFTP (port 8822).
- Delete or rename the existing
Worlds/folder contents (don't skip this – you want a clean restore target). - Upload your backup files to
R5/Saved/SaveProfiles/Default/RocksDB/<game-version>/Worlds/. - If you backed up
ServerDescription.json, upload that toR5/. - Start the server.
If the <game-version> folder name has changed since your backup was taken (Windrose updated), you'll need to match the backup's version folder to whatever the current server is using. Check via File Manager to see what's currently there, and rename your backup's folder to match.
After a Restore
Once the server is up, connect and check:
- Your world loads with the expected builds and progress
- Your inventory looks right
- Other players can still connect with the existing invite code
If any of these fail, check the Web Console logs for specific errors. The most common post-restore issue is a WorldIslandId mismatch – see our configuration guide for how to fix that, or the world corruption guide if the folder names don't line up.
If something's gone really wrong, restore the previous backup and start from there. This is why you want multiple restore points, not just one. Cloud Backup retention handles this for you; if you're doing manual backups, keep at least the last 3-5 you've made.
Backup Frequency
For a small group playing casually, a daily backup is plenty. For an active server with daily long sessions or a lot of mod experimentation, every 4-6 hours makes sense. If you're about to make a big change – mod update, config overhaul, dropping in a mystery .pak from Nexus – back up immediately before the change, regardless of schedule.
Our mods installation guide beats this drum pretty hard, but backups are the single highest-leverage habit for anyone running a Windrose server right now. The game's in Early Access. Things will break. Backups turn "things broke" into "things broke for 5 minutes until I restored."