Backups

Three layers, cheapest first.

1. Valheim’s own rolling backups

The server keeps a few WORLD_backup_auto-* copies next to the world in config/worlds_local/ (tune with WORLD_BACKUPS, BACKUP_SHORT, BACKUP_LONG). They protect against a corrupted save, not against losing the disk.

2. Repo backup script

./valheim backup

Writes ./backups/valheim-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM.tar.gz containing config/worlds_local/ and the three player lists, verifies the archive, and deletes archives older than 14 days.

BACKUP_DIR=/srv/backups RETENTION_DAYS=60 ./valheim backup

Schedule it:

30 9 * * 0 cd /home/you/valheim-game-server && ./valheim backup >> logs/backup.log 2>&1

If ./config is root-owned (you run with PUID=0), run it with sudo.

The game files in ./data and the image are reproducible and are intentionally left out.

3. Off-host copies

Everything above lives on the same disk as the server. Push the tarballs somewhere else after each backup:

rsync -av --delete ./backups/ backup@nas:/srv/backups/valheim/

S3-compatible storage with the AWS CLI:

aws s3 sync ./backups/ s3://my-bucket/valheim/ --exclude "*" --include "valheim-*.tar.gz"

Restic, Borg or rclone all work the same way. Chain the command after ./valheim backup in the cron entry.

Restore

./valheim restore ./backups/valheim-2026-10-15-0930.tar.gz

The script asks for confirmation, stops the server (which saves the current world first), extracts the archive over config/, and starts the server. Always restore into the same project directory the backup was taken from, and take a fresh backup before restoring so the current state is not lost.

To restore a single world by hand, stop the server and copy the world folder and its .fwl/.db files (or the chunked WORLD/ folder on newer builds) into config/worlds_local/, then start the server.