Palworld Backup and Restore Guide

What to Back Up

A Palworld world save consists of three critical items in the world save folder (Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/<WorldGUID>/):

Level.sav - World state: base buildings, Pal box contents, resource deposits, world objects.

LevelMeta.sav - World metadata.

Players/ folder - Individual character data for every player who has joined.

There are also optional files: WorldOption.sav (a settings snapshot - see the WorldOption.sav article) and LocalData.sav. The backup/ subfolder holds Palworld's own rolling backups.

A GameGrid backup covers more than the world. It takes Pal/Saved (so the world, PalWorldSettings.ini and the native ban list), your .pak mods in Pal/Content/Paks/~mods, and the UE4SS stack under Pal/Binaries/Win64 including PalDefender and its ban list, whitelist and economy token. That is deliberate: without them a restored server accepts players normally and the in-game shop silently stops delivering.

Creating a Backup

The easiest way is the Backups tab in your GameGrid panel. Click "Create Backup Now" to take a manual one. You can give it a label and a note afterwards, and delete it whenever you like.

Manual backups count against a 30 GB storage quota, shown as a bar on the same page.

Automatic backups are taken for you: daily, and immediately before every update and every reinstall. They are retained as the last 7 backups or 7 days, whichever comes first, they do not count against your quota, and you cannot label or delete them.

All of them are archived off the host, encrypted and checksummed.

For a file-level copy instead: stop the server, open the Files tab, navigate to the world save folder, and download the whole folder. Always stop the server first - copying while it is running can produce a corrupt copy.

The Game-Created Backups setting (bIsUseBackupSaveData, on by default) enables Palworld's own rolling backups in Pal/Saved/SaveGames/*/backup/world/. Leave it on; it is a cheap extra layer.

Restoring a Backup

Via the Backups tab: find the backup you want and click "Restore". Only a backup in the "verified" state offers the button; one still queued, or failed, does not. Confirm - the panel asks again if players are connected - and the server is stopped, restored and started.

The restore runs as a job. The panel polls it and reports the outcome on the page, so you can leave. If it does not complete, your server's files are left as they were.

Manual restore: stop the server, open the Files tab, navigate to the world save folder, remove the current Level.sav, LevelMeta.sav and Players/ folder, upload your copies, and start the server.

You can also roll back to Palworld's own backup folder: Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/<WorldGUID>/backup/world/ holds dated copies. Copy Level.sav, LevelMeta.sav and Players/ from the one you want into the main save folder.

What Restoring Overwrites

Restoring a backup overwrites everything in the world: all base buildings, Pal box contents, world state, and player character data. It is a full rollback to the moment the backup was taken.

Player levels, inventory, Pals and progress all revert. If a player joined after the backup was taken, their data is not in it.

It also rolls back your SETTINGS. PalWorldSettings.ini lives inside Pal/Saved, which is part of the backup, so the server name, passwords, rates and everything else return to what they were when the backup was taken. If you have changed settings since, re-apply them from the Settings tab afterwards and restart.

Your .pak mods and the UE4SS stack, including PalDefender's ban list and whitelist, are restored with it for the same reason.

The ports the platform assigned are not affected: the host agent rewrites the port and public-IP values into the config on every start, so a restored server does not come back on someone else's numbers.

Best Practices

Run Save in the Console tab before stopping the server by hand. It forces a clean save. Type it without a leading slash - the Console tab takes "Save", not "/Save".

Do not force-kill the server process. Use the Stop button in the panel, which triggers a graceful shutdown with a 90-second budget so a large world finishes writing.

Use fast SSD storage. Palworld's official documentation warns that slow storage can corrupt saves. GameGrid servers use SSDs by default.

Enable automatic backups and test a restore periodically so you know the process works before you need it in an emergency.