How to Back Up and Restore Your Valheim World

Something go wrong on your world? A griefing incident, a bad build you regret, or you just want to rewind a few hours. You don't need to have planned ahead for any of that. Valheim and the panel both keep backups for you already.

Method 1: restore from the panel

1. Open the Backups tab.
2. Find the backup from before things went wrong.
3. Click Restore.
4. Restart the server.

This is the easiest method and works for almost every situation.

Method 2: restore manually

Useful if you want a specific older world file rather than the most recent backup, or you're restoring from a file you downloaded yourself.

1. Open Files and navigate to .config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim/worlds_local/.
2. Your current save is <worldname>.db and <worldname>.fwl. Older backups sit alongside them with a date or number in the filename, and .old files are from the previous server restart.
3. Delete or rename the current .db and .fwl files.
4. Rename the backup files you want to restore to match your World Name exactly, both the .db and .fwl.
5. Restart the server.

Downloading your world

To keep a copy for yourself, outside of ThundraNode entirely, download the same .db and .fwl files from worlds_local/ through Files. Keep both files together, one is useless without the other.

Still stuck?

If a restore doesn't seem to take effect, confirm you restarted the server afterward. It won't load a different save file until it restarts. Still looks wrong after that? Open a support ticket with your server ID and roughly when things went wrong, and we'll check for an earlier backup on our end.