Characters and progress are mirrored to your account automatically, and can be restored onto a rebuilt server.
Player Data Backup & Restore
Everything you author — maps, items, NPCs, quests — lives in your project and is pushed to the live server by Publish. If a server is ever rebuilt, you republish and it comes back.
Everything your players create is different. Their characters, stats, skills, inventories, equipment, pets, quest progress, achievements, guilds, houses, land claims, mail and trades are created on the live server and exist nowhere else. Losing that server used to mean losing them.
Managed servers now back that data up to your ED5 account continuously, and you can write it back onto a server that lost it.
How the backup works#
It is automatic — there is nothing to switch on. Every five minutes your managed server sends the player rows that changed since the last sweep. An idle world sends almost nothing.
| What is backed up | Every player-owned table — characters and their stats, skills and loadouts, inventories and equipment, pets and mounts, wallets, quest and achievement progress, guilds and alliances, friends, mail, parties, trades, plots, land claims and placed objects |
| What is not | Anything you author. That already lives in your project |
| How often | Every 5 minutes, changed rows only |
| Where | Your ED5 account, scoped to the one project |
| Desktop / self-hosted | Not backed up — there is no managed server to send it |
Deletions are recorded as deletions, so a character a player deleted on purpose does not reappear when you restore.
Restoring onto a server#
Use this when a server has lost its data — a rebuilt VPS, a wiped disk, a failed migration. It is not an undo button for gameplay.
- Go to Account → Projects and find the project.
- Under Player data, choose Restore from cloud.
- Pick what to restore — Everyone, or a single character by name.
- Read the confirmation line, then choose Yes, restore.
Every backed-up row is written back. Rows already on the server with the same id are overwritten by the backup's copy; nothing is deleted. Anything created since the last backup stays where it is.
When it finishes you are told how many rows were restored, and how many were skipped.
Restoring one character#
Picking a single character restores that character and everything belonging to them — their stats, skills, inventory, equipment, quest and achievement progress.
Their account wallet and friends list are deliberately left alone. Those belong to the player rather than to one character, so rewriting them to repair one hero would roll back the others.
Use this when one player lost a character; use Everyone when the server itself lost its data.
Gotchas#
- Restore is refused while players are online. It rewrites the very rows a connected player is writing to, and whoever loses the race loses progress. Disconnect players first.
- The server must be online. Restore talks to a running game server; start it first.
- You cannot restore a project that has never backed up. If the mirror is empty you are told so, rather than being given a "restored 0 rows" success that looks like an empty backup.
- Restore does not bring back deleted characters. That is deliberate — see deletions above.
- The backup lags by up to five minutes. Anything created in the minutes before a server died may not be in it.
- A skipped row is usually a version gap — a server running an older build than the backup was taken from. Update the server and restore again.