Daily backups for every game server

Since 15 October, every game server on Vestra Hosting is backed up automatically, every night. It’s included on every plan, Tiny, Starter, Pro and Enterprise, at no extra cost, and you can restore a backup yourself from the game panel whenever you need to.

A broken update, a mod that clears a map, a config change you’d rather not have made: these things happen. They shouldn’t cost you a world or a community you’ve spent months building.

#What you get

• Three automatic backups. Every night we back up your server and keep the three most recent, so you can go back up to three days. They don’t use your manual slots, and they can’t be deleted, so they’re there when you need them.
• Manual backups for big changes. About to install a big update or a new mod pack? Take a backup first. You get one manual slot on Tiny, Starter and Pro, and three on Enterprise. A manual backup is kept until you replace it.
• Restore it yourself. Pick a backup in the panel and restore it, at any time. You don’t need to ask us first.

#Smart about what it saves

Most of a game server’s folder is files that come back on their own: the game itself, Steam files, caches and logs. Backing those up would make every backup bigger and slower without making it any more useful. So backups keep what’s yours (worlds and saves, addons, plugins, mods, resources, configs and data) and skip what reinstalls itself.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. One large Garry’s Mod server on our hosting is about 11 GB on disk; its backup is about 2 GB, and that 2 GB is the part that matters. Another, at 6.8 GB, backs up about 300 MB.

You’re in control of the list. It lives in a file called .pteroignore in your server folder, one line for each thing that’s skipped. If you keep something important in a folder we skip, delete that line and it will be backed up from then on.

#Off-site, and checked

Backups don’t sit on the machine that runs your server. They’re stored, encrypted, on separate backup storage with Hetzner in Germany. Each of the machines that runs game servers can only reach its own backup area: one can’t touch another’s backups, or the backups we keep of Vestra’s own systems.

Every day an automatic check confirms that every server got its backup, and alerts our team if one was missed or failed. We also restore backups from time to time as a test, to make sure they work when you need them.

#What isn’t included

The same goes for anything you couldn’t replace: daily backups make losing it much less likely, but a copy of your own is still the safest place for it.

#Where to find it

Backups are in the game panel, under Backups for each of your servers. The plans on our pricing page now list backups too, and there’s a short note in the changelog. For the bigger picture of how we look after our own systems, see how we protect your data.

Questions are welcome on Discord or in a ticket.