Terraria Backups & Saves: Protecting and Uploading Your World

A Terraria world is a single .wld file, and your group's entire history is in it. Here is where it lives on your server, how the game saves it, what the .wld.bak files are, what the Backups tab protects, how to bring in a world of your own, and the one settings change that makes a world look lost when it is not.

Where your world lives

Your server keeps its worlds in:

saves/Worlds/

Browse there on the Files tab or over SFTP. Each world is one .wld, named after the World Name on the Server Settings tab: a world called Dirt Castle is saves/Worlds/Dirt Castle.wld. The file holds everything about the world — terrain, buildings, chests, bosses defeated, difficulty — but not player characters. In Terraria, characters belong to the player and travel with them, so nothing about your friends' inventories is on the server.

How saving works

The game autosaves the world on its own while the server runs, and saves again when it is shut down with the exit command — the only command that saves on shutdown. The dashboard's Stop and Restart buttons send exit, so a dashboard restart never loses progress. You can also type save into the console on the Overview tab at any moment to force a save; it is worth doing before anything risky.

The .wld.bak files

Every time the world saves, the previous copy is kept alongside it as <World Name>.wld.bak. Your server is configured with worldrollbackstokeep=2, so two generations of rollback are kept. If a save goes wrong — a crash mid-write, a bad night the group would rather forget — the previous version is right there:

1. Stop the server.
2. On the Files tab, rename the current .wld out of the way (for example to Dirt Castle.wld.broken).
3. Rename the newest .wld.bak to Dirt Castle.wld.
4. Start the server.

The rollbacks are short-lived — each save pushes the oldest out — so they are for "undo the last few saves", not for long-term safekeeping. That is what the Backups tab is for.

What the Backups tab covers

The Backups tab snapshots the whole server: the saves/Worlds folder, the configuration and the logs together. A backup restores with one click. Your plan includes a set number of backup slots; when they are all used, delete an old one before taking a new one.

Take a manual backup before:

• a game update you expect to be large,
• uploading a different world or changing the World Name,
• any experiment with the console commands or Journey permissions.

Restoring returns the whole server to that snapshot. Anything that happened after it is gone, so restore deliberately, with the server stopped.

Downloading the world yourself

A copy you hold is the one nobody can take away. On the Files tab, open saves/Worlds and download the .wld. Do it with the server stopped, or after typing save in the console, so the file is not mid-write. A downloaded .wld dropped into your own PC's Worlds folder is a world you can play single-player or host from the game again.

Uploading a world of your own

The reverse works the same way. On your PC, Terraria keeps worlds in Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds on Windows and ~/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds/ on Linux (both from the Terraria wiki's server page). If the world lives in Steam Cloud rather than on disk, toggle it to local storage from the game's world list first so the file appears there.

1. Stop the server.
2. Upload the .wld into saves/Worlds on the Files tab or over SFTP. Keep its name.
3. On the Server Settings tab, set World Name to the file's name without .wld.
4. Start the server. It loads the uploaded world instead of creating one.

Two limits worth knowing. The server is vanilla, so a world last saved by tModLoader (which also writes a .twld beside the .wld) will not load — tModLoader worlds are on Terraria 1.4.4, and a vanilla 1.4.5 server cannot read them. And there is no path from a console save to a PC world file; Re-Logic has published none, so a world started on PlayStation, Xbox or Switch stays there.

The world-name switch: a world that looks lost

The server loads whichever file matches World Name. Change the name to one with no matching .wld, restart, and the server generates a new, empty world under the new name. Your old world is not gone — it is still in saves/Worlds under its old name, with its .wld.bak beside it — but the server is no longer loading it.

If your group logs in to find a fresh spawn and no base, check the World Name first. Set it back to the old name, restart, and everything is where you left it. The Server Settings tab warns you when a change would create a new world; this is why.

Restoring: the clean sequence

1. Stop the server.
2. Backups tab → choose the snapshot → Restore. (Or, for a rollback, rename the .wld.bak as above.)
3. Start the server and let the console settle.
4. Have one player join and confirm the world is what you expected before announcing it.

Related

• Every setting on the tab, including World Name: Server Settings
• Keeping the server on the players' version: Updates & versions