Enshrouded Saves, Backups and Restore
How Enshrouded saves your world, what a GameGrid backup holds, how to take one, and how to restore your Enshrouded server's world from the Backups page.
How Enshrouded saves your world
Your world is saved on the server, in the savegame folder: buildings, chests, terrain, quest progress and the survivors you have rescued. Characters are not: each player's level, skills, inventory and map exploration are kept by their own game.
Enshrouded saves the world about every 30 seconds while it runs, with or without players online, and once more when it is stopped cleanly. On the current game build the world is the file world0.ksd in savegame, and the game keeps a set of older copies of it in the backup folder beside it, updated less often than the world file. (Older game builds saved every 5 minutes, into a world file with a numbered set of copies and an index file.) Leave those files to the game: do not rename or edit them. The files are described in Enshrouded Save File Location.
Always stop from the panel
Stop and Restart shut Enshrouded down the way the game expects, and it saves the world before it exits. The same happens before every scheduled restart, every Event Manager window and every game update.
If the server is killed instead of stopped (a crash, or the machine losing power), everything since the last save (about 30 seconds on the current build) is lost. Nothing can ask Enshrouded to save on demand.
GameGrid backups
On top of the game's own rolling copies, GameGrid keeps backups of your server, stored away from the machine it runs on, so a backup survives something happening to the host, not just something happening to your world.
An Enshrouded backup holds:
| In the backup | Why it matters |
|---|---|
The savegame folder | Your world: every building, chest, terrain change and quest |
enshrouded_server.json | Your settings and your user groups, with their passwords |
The mods folder, if you have one | Your EML mods |
| The record of which settings were applied, and your server's own details | So a restore knows what the server was running |
The logs folder | What the server was saying at the time |
| Not in the backup | Where it lives instead |
| --- | --- |
| Your players' characters | On each player's own PC. Nothing to back up, and a restore cannot touch them |
| Wallets, shop, kits and links | GameGrid's own records. They survive a restore untouched |
| The game itself | Reinstalled from Steam, never backed up |
Enshrouded worlds are small (kilobytes to a few megabytes for a young world, and Keen quote up to about 100 MB for a big one), so taking a backup before any change is genuinely cheap.
Taking a backup
Automatic backups are taken for you daily, and before risky operations such as a restore or a game update. They appear under Automatic Backups. They share the server's 30 GB backup storage with your manual backups, and the oldest automatic backup is removed first when it is full.
To take one yourself:
1. Open Backups.
2. Optionally type a Backup label and a Note, so you can tell it apart later ("before Survival weekend").
3. Press Create Backup Now.
Manual backups appear under Manual Backups, count toward the Backup storage (manual and automatic) total shown at the top, are removed 30 days after they are taken, and are yours to restore or delete at any time.
Running or stopped? A backup taken while the server is running holds the world as of its most recent save, so it can be about 30 seconds behind. For a backup that holds everything right up to the moment you take it, stop the server first: the clean stop writes the world, and the backup then catches it. For most purposes a running backup is fine; before something irreversible (a wipe, a world import, a settings experiment you are unsure about) it is worth the extra minute.
The numbers are the same on every game and are shown on the Backups page: by default the last 7 automatic backups or the last 7 days are kept, whichever limit is reached first. Your manual and automatic backups share one 30 GB total per server. The newest automatic backup is the one exception to the 30-day maximum: it is kept until a newer automatic backup replaces it. See How Backups Work. GameGrid also takes disaster-recovery snapshots of every server, separately from your own backups.
Restoring a backup
1. Open Backups.
2. Find the backup you want. Only a backup that has been verified offers Restore.
3. Press Restore. Restore this backup? explains what happens; press Restore backup.
4. If players are online, Confirm Restore says how many will be disconnected. Press Yes, Restore Anyway to go ahead.
GameGrid takes a safety backup of the server as it is now (it appears in your list, so a restore can be undone), stops the server if it is running, puts the backup's world, settings and mods in place, and starts it again if it was running (a stopped server stays stopped). You do not need to stop the server yourself.
Restoring puts back the settings file in the backup, with the user groups and passwords it holds. If you have changed your groups or passwords since that backup was taken, check them in Settings after restoring and hand out the passwords again if needed.
Starting a fresh world
Take a backup first, then clear the world and start the server: Enshrouded creates a new one when it finds none. Your players keep their characters, because those live on their own PCs.
Step by step, with what a reset does and does not clear: Starting a Fresh Enshrouded World.
Where to go next
- How Backups Work โ schedules, retention and quotas on every game
- Starting a Fresh Enshrouded World
- Moving an Enshrouded World to Your Server
- Enshrouded Game Updates on GameGrid