Windrose Backup and Restore Guide

How backups work

Every Windrose server is backed up once a day automatically, and again immediately before a game update and immediately before a restore. Those automatic copies are kept to the last 7 backups or 7 days, whichever comes first, and are then removed — with one exception: the safety copy taken at the start of a restore is never evicted.

Backups are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they leave the host and stored in Wasabi object storage, which is separate infrastructure from the machine your server runs on. A SHA-256 checksum is taken on upload and checked again on download; a backup with no recorded checksum is refused rather than restored.

You can take your own at any time from the Backups tab. Manual backups share a 30 GB quota per server, are never removed automatically, and are the ones you can label and delete.

General behaviour is the same for every game — see How Backups Work. This article covers what is specific to Windrose.

What a Windrose backup contains

R5/Saved — the whole tree: your worlds under SaveProfiles (including each world’s own WorldDescription.json, which is where its difficulty and multipliers live), the game’s Config folder and its Logs folder.

R5/ServerDescription.json — your server name, invite code, password, player limit, world selection and region.

The per-instance config, mods, saves and logs folders where your server has them.

What is NOT in it: the Windrose game files themselves, which the platform re-lays from the host’s own copy rather than storing per customer; and Windrose Plus. Neither the windrose_plus/ installation nor windrose_plus.json is included, so a restore does not bring back your Windrose Plus settings. Note your multipliers and player stats somewhere before you rely on a restore, or read them off the Windrose Plus tab afterwards and set them again.

Taking a manual backup

Open the Backups tab in your server panel. Optionally fill in "Backup label (optional)" and "Note (optional)", then click "Create Backup Now".

The backup is queued — the button does not wait for it. It appears in the Manual Backups list once it has been taken and verified, with its size, state and age.

Your server does not have to be stopped. Windrose declares no save-flush command, so what the platform copies is what is on disk at that moment; if you want a clean point-in-time copy of a busy world, stop the server first.

A backup that could not copy part of your data is refused rather than recorded — the Status column shows "Backup incomplete: could not copy ..." and names the file. That usually means the running game held it open; stop the server and take it again.

Restoring a backup

Find the backup in the list and click "Restore". Only a backup whose state is "verified" offers the button; one still being taken, or one that failed, cannot be restored.

You do not have to stop the server first — the restore does it. It validates the archive, takes a safety copy of your current save, stages the incoming files somewhere else, swaps them into place in one atomic move, health-checks the server and starts it again. The page shows the job state as it goes.

If players are connected when you press Restore, a dialog tells you how many and asks you to confirm before anything happens.

Read which failure state you get, because the difference matters. "rolled_back" means your files were never changed — your world is exactly as it was. "failed" means they may have been, and the safety copy taken at the start is in your backup list.

Everything in the archive replaces what is on disk, so anything done since the backup was taken is gone. Take a fresh manual backup first if you might want to come back.

Getting a backup onto your own computer

A verified backup has a Download button on the Backups page. It opens the archive in a new tab and your browser saves it. For scripting, the same download is available through the Customer API with a key holding backups:read — see Customer API Reference.

For a copy of the live world rather than of a backup, FTP or SFTP is simpler: the host, ports, username and password are in Connection Info on the Overview tab, and the folder you want is R5/Saved.

When something goes wrong

A backup that fails while the server is stopping or restarting: wait for the badge in the status bar to settle on Online or Offline and try again.

A world that will not load after a restore: check the Console tab for a save-file error. Windrose has its own recovery mechanism as well — "Auto Load Latest Backup" on the Settings tab, on by default, makes the game try to repair a broken save from its own copy on launch. That is separate from GameGrid backups and works on a different set of files.

No automatic backups at all in the list: the daily one may simply not have run yet on a server built today. Take a manual one in the meantime.

If neither a restore nor the safety copy works, open a support ticket with the backup ID, the restore job state and the console output.