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ValheimGuideYour Valheim world is backed up automatically: daily on Always On, and on every shutdown, restart, and sleep on Wake & Play, plus before risky actions like…
Your Valheim world is backed up automatically: daily on Always On, and on every shutdown, restart, and sleep on Wake & Play, plus before risky actions like a restore or a world reset. You can also take a manual backup any time, and manual backups are kept for two years. Restoring is one click from your server's Backups, and a safety backup is taken before any restore, so even a restore can be undone.
While your server runs, Valheim writes the world to disk every 20 minutes and again when the server shuts down. Since 1.0 each world is a folder named after it, and Valheim's own automatic backups sit next to it as folders named YourWorld_backup_auto-<date>-<time>. Haptic's backups capture all of it, so the in-game restore options stay intact too.
On top of that cadence:
Always On servers get a daily automatic backup.
Wake & Play servers are backed up when the server goes to sleep, shuts down, or restarts, which on a sleep-when-empty server means a backup at the end of every play session.
Risky actions are guarded. Restores, world resets, and similar actions take a backup first.
Manual backups are yours to take whenever it matters: before a boss fight, before a big update, before experimenting with mods.
Every backup is kept for the first 7 days.
After that, one per day is kept up to a month back, then one per week up to about a year.
Manual backups are never thinned and are kept for two years.
Your latest backup is always kept, no matter what.
The full policy lives in Backup retention on Haptic.
Every backup is listed with the date and time it was taken.
Choose the backup from before the thing you want to undo: the raid that flattened your base, the mod experiment, the accidental reset.
A fresh safety backup of the current state is taken first, then your world is rolled back. When the server starts again, everyone is back at that moment.
Characters are separate from the world. Valheim stores characters with each player, not in the server's world file. A world restore rewinds buildings, terrain, and chests, but nobody's skills or inventory are touched.
Every backup downloads as a .zip with the whole world inside, to keep or to play on your own PC.
On the Backups card, click the backup you want, then click Download Backup.
Unzip it and open the worlds_local folder inside. Your world is the folder named after the world, and your server's name is not the world's name: a world your server created is Dedicated, and an uploaded world keeps its own name. Inside are _main.<N>.fwl2, _main.<N>.db2, _main.<N>.chunks, _main.<N>.ok and many .chunk files. (A backup from before the 1.0 update has no folder yet: its world is two files ending in .fwl and .db, so copy both.)
Copy that whole folder, every .chunk file included, into the worlds_local folder on your PC:
Windows: press the Windows key + R, paste %USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds_local, and press Enter.
macOS: in Finder open the Go menu, choose Go to Folder, and paste ~/Library/Application Support/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local.
Linux / Steam Deck: open ~/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local.
Start Valheim and pick Dedicated (or your uploaded world's name) in the world list.
The folder was only partly copied: without its .chunk files Valheim starts a brand-new world instead of loading yours, so copy the whole folder again. A .fwl and .db pair sitting next to the folder is not your current world either: it is the pre-1.0 copy the update left behind (see below), and folders named Dedicated_backup_auto-<date>-<time> are Valheim's own older backups.
Your world carried across the update automatically. The first start on 1.0 converted it to the new folder format and left the pre-1.0 copy next to it (YourWorld.db.old, YourWorld.fwl.old, and a YourWorld_backup_<date>-<time> pair). Backups taken before the update stay in your Backups list like any other.
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