How to Restore a Backup on Your Vintage Story Server

WinterNode takes automatic backups at 2PM and 2AM Central Time if the server is online. You are able to restore a Vintage Story world backup independently, or you can request a full-server backup to be restored.

Restoring a World Backup

Restoring a world backup allows you to only restore the world save, while leaving the rest of the server (i.e. mods and server config) intact.

Stop your server from the Game Control Panel console.
Navigate to the backups directory to data/.bckp using the File Manager.
You will see up to three of the most recent backups taken by our system.
Choose the backup you want and click the context menu … button .
Select Copy from the context menu.
Move the copied file by opening the context menu … on the new file and selecting Rename/Move
Change the path the file will be moved to from /data/.bckp/<backup name> to /data/Saves/<backup name>
Open the serverconfig.json file in the root directory using the File Manager
Update SaveFileLocation to the new filepath for the file you just moved.
For example, if the file name was winternode-2025-10-22_01-00-43.vcdbs, set SaveFileLocation to ./data/Saves/winternode-2025-10-22_01-00-43.vcdbs.
Start your server — your world will be restored.

Requesting a Full Server Backup

We take backups at 2PM and 2AM Central Time and we store these backups for 45 days (starting October 16th 2025). You can request a backup restore by opening a support ticket in our Discord or in the Client Area. Please provide the date and time you’d like the backup to be restored from. You are also able to request us to only restore the world rather than the full server if that’s your preference.

Controlling the Amount of Backups on Your Server

We provide the ability to control how many WinterNode backups are stored on your server with the [ADVANCED] Number of WinterNode local backups server option, accessible on the Server Options page in the Game Control Panel. This parameter controls how many scheduled backups WinterNode keeps in rotation to allow it to be backed up. At least one is required. Choose 1 if you need to conserve disk space, 2 (the default and recommended setting) for a balanced history, or 3 when you want the highest number of recent backups at the cost of extra storage.