Backups: What We Store, Where, and Why It Matters
A look at how backups actually work on our infrastructure, and why you should still make your own.
A look at how backups actually work on our infrastructure, and why you should still make your own.
Backups are one of those features that feels like a box-ticking exercise until the day you actually need one. We've had customers lose world data — usually due to a corrupted world file, an accidental deletion, or a plugin going wrong and mangling data — and the ones who had recent backups got back up and running quickly. The ones who didn't had a much worse day.
Backups in Pterodactyl are manual by default — you create them from the Backups tab in your server panel. Each backup creates a compressed archive of your entire server directory, including the world files, plugins folder, and configuration. You can restore from any available backup with a single click, and you can download backups locally if you want an off-panel copy.
At the infrastructure level, our NVMe storage runs in RAID configurations that protect against single-drive failures. Node-level hardware failure is an extremely rare event, but it's not impossible. For that reason, we strongly recommend downloading your backups periodically and keeping a copy somewhere outside our infrastructure — whether that's your own machine, a cloud storage service, or anywhere else you control.
For most servers, creating a backup before major changes (new plugins, world edits, version upgrades) and on a regular weekly schedule gives reasonable coverage. Large active servers with lots of player building might benefit from daily backups. The right frequency depends on how much work you'd be willing to redo if something went wrong.
It takes about 30 seconds to create a backup. That 30 seconds has saved a lot of hours of work for customers who thought they'd never need it.