Dedicated server backup

[Automatic12pro]

I just learned that there’s a way to restore ark saves other than copying the entire island_wp folder and having multiple archives of that.

So if you’re like me getting a discord message at 8am with “all my stuff is missing, what happened?” and you realize you messed something up last night when tweaking the server. Did you backup the save files before beforehand? Of course not, why would you still be reading if so. Well here’s how I fixed it.

In the save game folder there should be an island_wp.ark file. This is your map as it exists now. There’s also however a bunch of island_wp_[timestamp].ark files. It looks something similar to island_wp_23.04.2024_16.11.04.ark.

Look for the one that has the date modified date/time that you want to restore from and rename it to island_wp.ark. You’ll need to rename or delete the bad save first.

Now load the server and your map is restored to last night before you deleted everyone’s mods. Not sure what frequency this file is created or what exactly creates it but there should be a couple days worth to revert to.

Another plus is that doing this vs copying an entire save folder will not delete player profiles that transferred to the map as it’s only restoring the map save.

“I don’t always test, but when I do it’s in Production”