Nobody thinks about Valheim server backups until the world loads and the base isn't there, or until the game refuses to load it at all. Then it's frantic. The questions all arrive at once: what got saved, when, where does it live, and can any of it be undone.
Valheim 1.0 made this worth twenty minutes of your time even if you've run a server for years, because it changed what a world and a backup look like on disk. The old instructions about copying a .db and a .fwl don't describe a 1.0 world any more.
There are two backup systems on your server and they protect you from completely different things. Confusing them is how a group ends up believing they're covered when they aren't. Plenty do.
What Valheim backs up on its own
The dedicated server keeps its own rolling backups with no setup from you at all. Four launch arguments govern it, and these are Iron Gate's stock values (what your server is running unless somebody has deliberately changed them):
-saveinterval 1800
-backupshort 7200
-backuplong 43200
-backups 4
In plain English: the world auto-saves every 30 minutes, the first backup is taken 2 hours after the server starts, the ones after that come every 12 hours, and 4 are kept in rotation. That last number isn't four evenly spaced copies. It's one short backup from 2 hours ago plus three long ones spaced 12 hours apart, so you get a bit of reach into the past rather than four snapshots of the same afternoon. Those settings still apply on 1.0.
All of it lives in config/valheim/worlds_local/, which you can open on the Files tab. Here's what a world called Midgard looks like there on 1.0:
Midgard/: the world itself. It's a folder now, full of small.chunkfiles plus four_mainfiles (.chunks,.db2,.fwl2and.ok), and only the chunks that changed get rewritten on each save. Don't rename anything inside it or pick files out of it.Midgard_backup_auto-20260912-173107/: the actual rotating backups, one folder each, named with the date, a dash, then the time. Each one is its own folder holding the whole world.
If Midgard is older than 1.0, you'll also find what the conversion left behind the first time a 1.0 server loaded it:
Midgard.db.oldandMidgard.fwl.old: the last pre-1.0 save, renamed.Midgard_backup_20260909-134827.dband its.fwl: a safety copy Valheim took just before converting. Note there's noautoin that name.- any pre-1.0 rotating backups, still as flat
Midgard_backup_auto-20260908155340.dband.fwlpairs, left untouched.
The _backup_ copy is the world as it was on the day it converted. Handy as a last resort. Useless as a recent backup, and loading one by mistake puts your group back on launch day.
One thing no server backup covers, and it catches people out: characters. Valheim keeps each player's character on their own PC, not on the server, and 1.0 didn't change that. So a world backup holds the terrain, the buildings and everything in the chests. Not one inventory. Not one skill level. If somebody wipes their character, that's a local file on their machine and nothing on our side brings it back. Worth saying to your group once, ideally before it matters.
This system is genuinely good at one thing: surviving a crash or an unclean shutdown. 1.0's save format is built to cope with a save being cut off halfway, which helps. For everything else it's useless. It lives on the same disk as the thing it's protecting and it overwrites itself on a timer, so a bad mod corrupts your world on Monday, you notice on Thursday, and the rotation ate the good copy days ago.
On a self-hosted box you'd change those four numbers on the launch line. On our panel they're sliders in the Saves & Backups group on the Manage tab: Save Interval, Backups Kept, First Backup After and Backup Interval. Save, restart, done. Dropping the save interval to 900 seconds on a busy world is reasonable. Most groups never touch any of it. I haven't on mine.
What a LOW.MS Valheim server backup actually captures
The second layer is the Backups tab, and it writes a copy off the server entirely, into cloud storage in your server's region. That's the one that survives a bad update, an overwritten world, or a mistake you only spot three days later.
For Valheim it archives your worlds (config/valheim/worlds_local/ and config/valheim/worlds/, so every world and every one of Valheim's own backup folders) and your mod settings (game/BepInEx/config/). That's the part that's genuinely yours, the part nothing on Steam or Thunderstore can give you back. Because it takes the whole worlds folder, the 1.0 layout makes no difference to it.
What it doesn't hold is the mods themselves, or the server's settings. Both are worth knowing about rather than a problem: the Mods tab already knows what you had installed and puts it back, and your settings live in the panel and are written fresh on every start. Your admin, ban and whitelist are panel lists too, so they don't need archiving. Restore onto a freshly reinstalled server and your world and your mod configs come back; the mods you reinstall from the Mods tab.
Two more things about the archive. You can keep 20 at a time, and the tab tells you how many you've used. When the twenty-first is created, the oldest one you haven't locked is deleted to make room, and the panel says which one before you confirm. If there's a backup you never want rotated away (the one from just before 1.0, say), use the lock toggle on its row. Locked backups are never deleted to make room, and if all twenty are locked the tab will ask you to unlock or delete one before it makes another.
And Create backup is a button, not a background job. Clicking it makes a backup right now and arranges precisely nothing for tomorrow. To make it recurring, open the Settings tab, find Scheduled tasks, hit Add schedule and pick Backup. Daily, weekly or monthly, at a time of day in your own timezone. Nightly suits most active groups. Weekly is still a great deal better than what most people have, which is nothing, and it takes about two minutes, the most useful two minutes on this page.
One catch. A backup doesn't stop your server first, on the schedule or from the button. On a live world it's archiving files the game is still writing to, and anything Valheim has locked at that moment gets skipped silently. If every file is locked the backup fails with "Stop the server and retry." For an overnight schedule that's usually fine, because Valheim writes the world only during a save. For the backup you're about to rely on, stop the server, then take it. Then start it again.
How to restore a backup, and the order it has to happen in
Restore is on the same tab, one per row. The server has to be stopped first, and the panel won't let you restore a running one, so that's one thing you can't get wrong. It pulls the archive down from storage and unpacks it over your server.
What's worth understanding is that it overwrites rather than wipes. Files from the archive land on top of what's there, and anything that exists now but wasn't in the backup is left exactly where it is. Nearly always that's fine. It stops being fine when your problem is an extra thing rather than a missing one: a second world you created by mistyping the World Name is the classic case, and restoring won't remove it. Check the Files tab afterwards if the world list looks longer than you expected.
If you'd rather look before you leap, Download on a backup row hands you the zip (the link only lives a few minutes, so click it when you're ready). Open it on your own machine, confirm the world you think is in there actually is, then restore.
Keeping a copy we can't touch
Panel backups are the right default. I'd still keep one copy somewhere you control, because a backup on our infrastructure covers you against an update going wrong and covers you against rather less if the thing you're recovering from also happened on our side.
The easy way is that same Download button: one zip, your worlds and mod configs, on your own disk. The other way is the Files tab: stop the server, go to config/valheim/worlds_local/ and download your world's folder, the whole thing, chunk files included. It's smaller than people expect. Drop it in a folder with the date in the name and you've got something no panel action, ours or yours, can reach. There's more on the general shape of this, across every game we run, in what actually saves you when a world dies.
Before you update, and right now
Valheim still patches after 1.0 (the 1.0.12 hotfix came two days after launch), so the habit is worth building. Four things, in this order, before any update:
Stop the server, take a backup on the Backups tab, and lock it. Download it too if the update is a big one. Belt and braces.
Write your world's name and its seed down somewhere that isn't the server. If the worst happens and you end up rebuilding, knowing the seed is the difference between the same map and a stranger's.
If you're starting fresh rather than updating, don't delete world folders by hand, and don't reach for the New World action either: it was built for the old pair of files and doesn't clear a 1.0 world folder yet. Take a backup, lock it, and open a ticket. We'll wipe it properly.
And tell your players not to log in during the update. A half-updated server writing to a world is exactly the situation you don't want.
There's also one 1.0 warning that makes a backup urgent rather than sensible. Iron Gate's 1.0.12 notes say items on armour stands and item stands could lose their durability and upgrade level in worlds that had been loaded on 1.0, and they're telling people not to remove high-level items from stands "without using backups if you have been playing 1.0". So take one before anybody touches the trophy wall. The update itself has a full walkthrough in updating your Valheim server to 1.0, and if you're wondering whether the Deep North turns up on ground you've already explored, that has its own answer, probably not the one you're hoping for.
"Check backups": when a world has already gone wrong
If the log says World load failed mid-file. Exiting without save. Check backups!, or the game tells you there was an error loading the world file and to check backups, Valheim couldn't read the main world file and is pointing you at its own _backup_auto- folders. Don't do anything yet.
Stop the server before you touch anything else. Do that first. Every minute it keeps running is another minute it might write over the copy you're trying to rescue.
Then work outwards from the newest thing that isn't broken. Restore from the Backups tab first, if you've got one. If you haven't, go into config/valheim/worlds_local/ on the Files tab and check what Valheim kept for you: the newest _backup_auto- folder is at most twelve hours old on the default settings, and usually less. Since 1.0 each of those is its own world folder, and swapping one in by hand is fiddly enough that I'd open a ticket and let us do it rather than rename folders on a world you care about. Leave the pre-1.0 .db.old and _backup_ files alone too, unless you genuinely want the world as it was on the day it converted.
If the world loads and looks like it's rolled back a few hours, that's the rotation doing its job. Nothing wrong. If it loads empty, or sits there generating fresh terrain, the server is almost certainly pointed at a different world name than the one you meant. Check World Name on the Manage tab against the folders actually sitting in worlds_local, because a typo there produces a brand new world rather than an error. Don't lean on the field's suggestions for a 1.0 world, either: they were built for the old two-file format and can miss a world folder that's sitting right there. More symptoms and fixes live in the Valheim troubleshooting guide, and the save location guide covers which files matter if you're uploading a world back from your own machine.
Open a ticket if a restore doesn't take, if the files look wrong and you'd rather somebody else drove, or if you need a copy from further back than the tab offers. Tell us the world name and roughly when it was last definitely fine. That narrows it down enormously. We'd much rather spend ten minutes on this with you than read a ticket that opens with "I didn't have a backup".