The Isle Save Location & How to Upload Your World

Moving a The Isle server is a bit different from most games. Your community's progress — every dino they've grown, every unlocked species, every Steam64-keyed player file — is sitting on disk on your old host. If you copy the wrong thing, or copy the right thing in the wrong order, people log back in to a fresh hatchling and a very unhappy Discord. This guide walks you through shifting a self-hosted Evrima server (or a server from another host) onto your LOW.MS dedicated server without losing a single juvenile Rex.

Where The Isle Saves Live on Your Server

The Isle stores everything underneath the server's TheIsle/Saved/ folder. The parts that matter on Evrima are:

• TheIsle/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/ (or LinuxServer/ on Linux) — holds Game.ini and Engine.ini, which contain your server name, map, slot count, admin Steam64 IDs, and Epic Online Services block.
• TheIsle/Saved/PlayerData/ — holds the per-player progression files. Each file is named after the player's Steam64 ID and contains their current dino, growth, hunger, thirst, health, progression points, progression tier, and unlocked characters.
• TheIsle/Saved/SaveGames/ — holds map-level save data (server-wide migration state, nest data, and other persistent world info). Bring this across alongside PlayerData/ to keep the world fully intact.

You may also have an AdminList entry inside Game.ini, ban entries, and a Logs/ folder. The PlayerData/ folder is the one that, if lost, costs your community their dinos.

If you're still running the older Legacy branch, the equivalent per-player folder is TheIsle/Saved/Databases/ instead. Everything else in this guide still applies — just swap the folder name.

Before You Do Anything

Stop both the old server and the new one before you copy files. The Isle writes player state back to disk regularly, and a live server can happily overwrite a fresh upload mid-copy.

On the old host, shut the service down, then zip the entire TheIsle/Saved/ directory. On your LOW.MS server, go to control.low.ms, open the Isle service, and click Cloud Backup from the service sidebar. That gives you a clean rollback point for the empty template before you start pasting files in.

Uploading via File Manager

For smaller servers (under a few hundred MB of save data), File Manager is the fastest route.

1. In control.low.ms, open your Isle service and click File Manager.
2. Navigate to TheIsle/Saved/.
3. Drag your zipped Saved archive into the window and wait for the upload to finish.
4. Right-click the archive and choose Extract, then confirm you want to overwrite existing files.
5. Delete the archive once extraction is done.

File Manager handles the extract server-side, so you don't need to unzip locally first.

Uploading via SFTP

For larger transfers — or if you prefer a desktop client — use SFTP. LOW.MS exposes SFTP on port 8822.

1. In the panel, open Service Settings and copy your SFTP username, password, and host.
2. Connect with FileZilla or WinSCP to your-host:8822.
3. On the remote side, browse to TheIsle/Saved/.
4. Upload your Config/, PlayerData/, and SaveGames/ folders, overwriting when prompted.
5. Confirm the file counts match your local copy before disconnecting.

If the transfer stalls, drop the client's parallel connections to 1 — a few SFTP clients trip over The Isle's many small per-player files when they run multiple streams.

Pointing the Server at Your Save Data

The Isle reads save folders by path relative to the install directory, so as long as your files landed in TheIsle/Saved/PlayerData/ and TheIsle/Saved/SaveGames/, you're already pointed at the right place. Open TheIsle/Saved/Config/WindowsServer/Game.ini in File Manager and double-check:

• ServerName matches what your players expect.
• Your Steam64 ID is listed under the admin section so you can log in as admin in-game.
• The map value (Gateway, Isla Spiro, etc.) matches the save data you uploaded — loading Evrima progression on the wrong map will reject the files.

Save the file. No separate database import step is needed.

Starting Up

From the Isle service page in the panel, run a Steam Update to make sure the server binaries are current, then start the service and open Web Console. Watch the log as it boots. You're looking for the server to register with Epic Online Services and begin loading player files — not errors about missing config sections.

Join the server yourself first. If your old dino loads in at the correct growth and position, the migration worked. If you get a fresh hatchling, stop the server immediately and restore the LOW.MS Cloud Restore point you took earlier, then re-check your upload.

A Few Things to Know

The Isle has two live branches: Evrima (the current development build) and Legacy. Save data is not portable between them. If your old server was on Legacy and your LOW.MS template is Evrima, your files will either be ignored or cause the server to refuse to boot — you'll need a fresh start on the new branch.

Even inside Evrima, player file schemas change between patches. If you're moving from a server that's several versions behind, expect some fields (particularly newer progression attributes and unlocked-character lists) to reset on first load. That's normal and doesn't indicate a failed upload.

Finally, take a Cloud Backup from the panel the moment your server is stable. It's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy for a persistent dino server.