📽️ Video Guide 📽️

In this article, we will learn how to make backups for our server. We can do this either manually, or automatically!
We highly encourage you to use our backups system to keep your server safe from attackers, griefers, and hackers. Please note, we do not allow backup plugins on our servers. Using backup plugins may result in a termination of your server!

📩 Creating a manual backup 📩

To get started, make sure you're at WitherPanel and you are at the server you want to create the backup for! Start by going to the backups section.



Then, once you're at that page, you'll see the button to create a backup. Click on that button, and a window will pop up.



In that window, you can provide a name for the backup, as well as any files you want to ignore. For example, if you want to ignore the coreprotect folder, located in plugins, you can write plugins/coreprotect

For each directory or file you do not want backed up, you need to go to the next line, and then write out the directory.

An example of a ignored files list with ignoring coreprotect's plugin folder, logs folder, and server.jar is below

server.jar
plugins/coreprotect
logs

You can also choose to lock the backup, which means that it cannot be deleted unless it is unlocked by you. This is useful when you have server subusers with the ability to delete backups! Once you've chosen how you want your backup to be, simply click on "Create Backup".



Give it a few minutes, and your backup will be created at the backups section! Remember that the time it takes for a backup to complete is based on your server size. The bigger the server, the longer it takes.

🤔 What you can do with the backup 🤔

To do things with this backup, click on the 3 dots at the right. You can then choose to -

Copy Link - Get a link to download the file of the backup. This is useful when you want to share backups to people who cannot access your backups tab in the panel.
Download - Download the backup with all it's contents. Note that every single file ( except for ignored directories/files ) will be downloaded. You can use a program such as 7-Zip to extract the downloaded archive on your computer.
Rename - Rename the backup to a name of your choice.
Restore - Restore the backup to the server, deleting all the current server files, and restore all the files into the server.
Lock - Lock the backup to make it inaccessible to downloading, restoration, or deletion. You can always unlock later.
Delete - Delete the backup. Note that once deleted, it cannot be recovered.

🔃 Creating Automatic Backups 🔃

Creating automatic backups requires some more setup, but this will automatically back up your server without the need to use the backup function every time. It is very handy and is always recommended to have backups of your server from time to time. This makes sure you have the latest copy of data always if something goes wrong in your server!

⏲️ Creating the Schedule ⏲️

Select the server you wish to add the automatic backups to.
Select "Schedules" on the sidebar of the panel.



Click the blue "Create Schedule" button.
Enter the times that you want the backup to run, in cron time format. In our case, we will do it every 6 hours. Click on create schedule!

☁️ Creating the Task ☁️

You can then click on the schedule you just created and hit the "New Task" button.
From the "action" dropdown, select create backup. This is also the step where you can add folders to ignore in the backup, if you wish. Then just click create task.

💭 Conclusion 💭

Your automatic backups should now be working! If you need more help with schedules, you can go to this article to learn more! Backups are very crucial for keeping your server safe. Even if you may not be using it as often as you would think, you will be grateful for it when you need it.

Updated on: 28/02/2024