7 Days to Die Backup and Restore Guide
How to back up and restore your world, what a backup contains, and how to recover a corrupted save.
What Gets Backed Up
A GameGrid backup of a 7 Days to Die server captures everything that is actually yours:
saves/ - the world, region files, player profiles, the rendered map tiles, and serveradmin.xml.
config/serverconfig.xml - the live server configuration.
Mods/ - every installed mod folder.
logs/, platform.cfg, steam_appid.txt and the instance metadata.
It does not include the shared game binaries. Those are linked from a shared install on the host, and a restore reinstalls rather than restores them.
Creating a Backup
Open the Backups tab and click "Create Backup Now". Give it a label and a note if you want to find it again later; both are optional.
Manual backups count against your 30 GB manual quota, shown as a bar at the top of the tab. Automatic ones do not.
Automatic backups run daily, and also before an update and before a reinstall. They appear in their own section and are kept on a rolling retention policy that the tab states.
Run saveworld in the Console tab first if you want the backup to include the last few minutes of play. The game only writes on its own timer otherwise.
You can also upload a backup archive from your own machine with "Upload Backup" on the same tab.
Restoring a Backup
On the Backups tab, find the backup and click "Restore". The platform stops the server, restores the files and starts it again.
If players are connected you are asked to confirm before it goes ahead.
A restore takes a copy of the server as it is immediately beforehand, so a restore that goes wrong is itself recoverable.
Restoring replaces your world and your config with the ones in the backup. Anything since that backup is gone.
Manual file-level restore is possible from the Files tab - stop the server, replace the contents of saves/ - but the Backups tab is faster and safer, and it handles the stop and start for you.
Resetting Part of a World
Max Chunk Age, in Settings under World, resets chunks that nobody has visited. It is the number of in-game days an unvisited chunk survives before it goes back to how it generated. The default is -1, which disables it entirely.
Land claims and bedrolls protect an area from that reset, so player bases are not affected.
To reset a specific area instead, the in-game console command is chunkreset. Run saveworld before you use it, and take a backup first - it cannot be undone.
To start over completely, use "Wipe Server" on the Admin tab, or change Savegame Name in Settings to start a fresh save alongside the old one.
Corrupted Save Recovery
Symptoms: the server will not start, the console reports region file errors, or players fall through the world in one area.
Stop the server. Repeated failed starts can make it worse.
Restore the most recent good backup from the Backups tab. That is the fastest and safest fix and it is what the automatic daily backups are for.
If you have no usable backup, you can delete an individual corrupted region file from saves/Saves/<World>/<Savegame>/region/ with the server stopped. The server regenerates that area from scratch - you lose everything built there and keep the rest of the world.
Take a manual backup before deleting anything. A deleted region does not come back.
The Admin tab also has "Verify / Repair Files", which checks the game files against the known-good manifest. That repairs a damaged install; it does not repair a damaged world.