There are several ways to backup your server when you are hosting with Echonode. When you know how to host your Minecraft server it is imperative to know how to back it up, because it would be a shame if you lost your server or mess something up.

When should I backup.

The first questions you should ask yourself is when you should backup. It is especially important to do an extra back up when you are updating your server, either to a new Minecraft version, Spigot or forge version. Also, when you are changing many things on the server all at once and run the risk of messing something up it is important to do an extra backup beforehand, if something goes wrong you can easily fix it that way.

Additionally, it is recommended to ensure you back up every day or every couple of days, this way if something happens, maybe your chunk gets corrupted or a griefer logs in you can roll back to the back up.

You can also use backups to go back to your server. Imagine you have your own Minecraft server and want to play modded Minecraft suddenly. You can back up your current server or create a different instance. After you have back it up you can install your new server and if you ever want to go back to your old server you can back up the new server and easily roll back to the old one without losing anything.

How to back up.

There are several ways to backup your server.

The best and most complete way to backup would be to back up the entire server. To do this you can either use the back up function in the portal or download the entire server onto your PC and save it there.

To back up your server using the webui go to the back up option on the webui.
 

Here you can see all backups you have made in the past, and how many backup slots you have. I am currently using 6 out of 8 backup slots I have. A standard plan comes with x backups and you can buy additional back up slots. On this page you want to click on create back up and a new interface will open up.

Here you can enter a backup name, you want to make it obvious so you don’t forget what you backup and when. Additionally you can add folders or directories you want to ignore in the backup. Just enter the path to the folder for example: 
/home/container/?

Lastly you can lock the back up this means the back up is prevented from being accidentally deleted and to delete it you first have to unlock it before you can delete it.

Restoring your backups is just as simple, you want to press the 3 dots next to the name of the back up and a new window will open up.

Here you can choose to download, restore, lock or delete your backup. If you lock it the delete button disappears until you press unlock.

To restore the backup just press restore. Keep in mind this will delete what is currently on your server.  You can also download the back up to your pc, either to save it there and later restore it manually or for other purposes.

How to automate the back up process:

Instead of backing up your server manually there are also ways to do it automatically via the web interface. This is very important because you cannot add manual backups every day. To do this you want to go the schedules page on your webui.

Here you can see the schedules you currently have and see if they are enabled or not. Here you want to click the button Create Schedule. 

Here you can name your schedule and fill how often it needs to run. For more information on how to use this page please go to: article on schedules.

You want to name the schedule, I recommend daily backup if this is going to be your daily backup and you don’t need to touch the buttons.

This schedule will run daily at 00:00 if you want to customize it check out the previously mentioned guide on schedules. Click create schedule and after click on the schedule this should open a page that looks like this

Now you want to add a new task

Click on send command

And select create backup.

This schedule will run daily and create a backup at midnight, keep in mind that when your backup slots are full it will delete the oldest slot automatically. Now click create task and you have an automatic daily backup that will be made.

This is the simplest and most trustworthy way to back up your servers.

Manual backups

The second way is to manually back up your server. You can either backup just the world folder or the entire server

To easily backup the entire server on your pc you can follow the steps above, then download the backup and store it on your pc and delete it from the server. Or you can follow this guide to enter the server folder via a File transfer app and there you can manually download the entire server, or just the world. To restore the backup, you simply replace the folder on the FTP with the folder you backed up.

Mods or Plugins

Lastly there are several plugins or mods that you can use to backup just the world. This means that if the server gets corrupted or stops working you could reinstall all mods, plugins or the entire server and just restore the world which is the most important part. Additionally, if something happens and you need to restore the world that is simple to do.

Simple Backups - Minecraft Mod: Simple backups is a Minecraft mod that adds features to automatically back up your Minecraft world folder. The mod is highly customizable and allows you to choose how often you want to back up, how much backups you want the mod to keep how much they should be compressed and how much storage it should use. This is a very simple trustworthy way to automatically backup your world every couple of hours for example and has saved me many headaches in the past when I accidentally lost an item that took me a long time to get.

The only downside is that the mod is very data heavy if you have a large world and you can quickly run out of storage so you need to ensure you limit the nr of backups so you don’t run out of storage.

The big advantage is that it automatically backups the world every few hours so it is difficult to mess up your world.

There are also plugins such as Server Backup / Ingame / Dropbox / FTP Backup 1.18 - 1.21 [Multithreaded] | SpigotMC - High Performance Minecraft Community and DriveBackupV2 | SpigotMC - High Performance Minecraft Community. All these mods and plugins do basically the same way.