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The built-in world backups

Valheim's own backup rotation on the server, how the BACKUP variables work, and restoring from one.

1 min readUpdated 2026-09-14Diese Anleitung auf Deutsch lesen →

Besides the panel's backups, the Valheim server keeps its own rolling backups of the world. The Startup variables control them:

  • BACKUP_COUNT (default 4): how many backups to keep.
  • BACKUP_INTERVAL (seconds, default 1800): how often the game writes a backup.
  • BACKUP_SHORTTIME / BACKUP_LONGTIME: Valheim keeps one recent backup at least this old (short) and one older one (long), so a corruption you notice late still has an intact copy.

The files appear next to the world as <Name>_backup_auto-<date>.db/.fwl.

Restoring

Stop the server. In worlds_local/, rename the current <Name>.db/.fwl (add -broken), then copy the backup pair you want and rename it to <Name>.db / <Name>.fwl. Start. Or ask Kowalski: "restore the newest Valheim auto backup".

Still make panel backups

Valheim's backups protect against world corruption. The panel backups protect against everything else (deleting the wrong folder, a bad mod, moving hosts). Both take a minute to set up.