Tickless Backups

💾 Tickless Backups

⚡ Fast, reliable world backups that never lag your server.

Tickless Backups takes a consistent snapshot of your world while the server keeps running, then stores and verifies it on background threads. It keeps only what changed since the previous backup, so a backup of a world of tens of gigabytes pauses autosave for a fraction of a second and adds only the changed files. The main thread never waits for the copy, the hashing or the verification: your TPS stays steady while a backup runs.

🧩 Available for NeoForge and Fabric (same features), Minecraft 26.1 – 26.3.

🚀 Why use it

• ⏱️ Tickless: copying, hashing, storing and verifying never run on the server thread.
• 📦 Incremental: an unchanged file is stored once, however many backups contain it. A changed region file is stored in pieces along its chunks, so one changed chunk adds a few KB, not the whole region.
• ⚛️ Atomic snapshots: autosave is paused only while the snapshot is taken. On filesystems with reflink (Btrfs, XFS, APFS, recent OpenZFS) it takes milliseconds and almost no extra space.
• ✅ Verified: every file is named after its SHA-256, written atomically and read back before it is trusted. /backup verify checks everything on demand or on a schedule.
• 🛡️ Safe by design: autosave is never left off, and an administrator’s own /save-off is never undone.

✨ Features

• 🕒 Automatic backups every N minutes and/or at fixed times, skipped while nobody is online
• 🗑️ Retention by count, age and/or total size; the newest backup is never deleted
• ⏪ One-command restore: /backup restore <name> verifies the backup and applies it when the server stops; your current world is kept, never deleted
• 🎯 Partial restore: bring back only a dimension, a folder or a player’s data
• 🔍 Backup diff: see which files were added, removed or changed between two backups
• 📤 Export any backup as a standalone .zip
• ☁️ Off-site upload to S3-compatible storage (AWS S3, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2…) or WebDAV, with retries; /backup fetch brings a backup back, verified by hash
• 🗜️ zstd compression (pure Java, nothing native to install)
• 🪝 Hooks: run your own command before, during or after a backup
• 🔔 Webhook notifications (Discord or generic JSON) for failures, problems found, low disk space
• 🖥️ In-game configuration screen (/backup gui) and a 📊 progress bar in the action bar

🏁 Quick start

1. 📁 Put the jar in your mods folder (the one for your Minecraft version).
2. ▶️ Start the server: config/tickless-backups.json is created.
3. 💬 Run /backup start as an operator (permission level 4) or from the console.

Backups are in backups/<world folder>/. The mod works on dedicated servers and in singleplayer.

⌨️ Commands

/backup start | full | status | list | verify | diff | export | restore | upload | fetch | notify test | gui | reload

Full list and details in the documentation.