Every guide on this site says “back up first” — this one explains what that actually means, in enough detail to follow. It matters more for MCA Selector than for most tools: MCA Selector has no save button and no undo. Deleting chunks or running the NBT Changer writes straight into your world files the moment you confirm, as explained in why MCA Selector changes are already saved. One wrong selection can take out a whole region — the accident in our deleted-a-whole-region guide is the one readers write in about. A good backup turns that from a disaster into a ten-minute restore.
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What counts as a backup
A backup is a copy of the entire world folder, made while the world is closed: the level.dat file, the region, poi and entities folders, and the player data. Copying only the region folder is the classic partial backup — the terrain comes back but the entities and points of interest do not. Copying while the game or server is running is the other classic: the copy catches files mid-write and may restore a world that is subtly corrupt. Stop the server, close the game, then copy.
The 3-2-1 rule, in plain words
Backup professionals use a rule called 3-2-1. Translated for a Minecraft world it is simply this:
- 3 copies of the world — the live one you play on, plus two backups.
- 2 different kinds of storage — for example your PC’s drive and an external drive, so one hardware failure cannot take both.
- 1 copy somewhere else — a cloud copy, so theft, fire or a dead PC at home cannot take every copy at once.
You do not need all of this for a throwaway test world. For a world with months of building in it, you need exactly this.
The workflow, step by step
- Stop and copy. With the game closed (or the server stopped), copy the whole world folder to your backup location on the same machine or an external drive.
- Compress and name it properly. Zip the copy and name the archive with the date and the reason:
myworld-2026-10-21-before-prune.zipbeatsworld-backup-final2.zipsix months from now. - Send one copy to the cloud. Upload the same archive to cloud storage so an off-site copy exists. We use pCloud for this in our own workflow — set up a “Minecraft Backups” folder once and drop each new archive in.
- Rotate, do not hoard randomly. Keep the last few editing backups plus one monthly milestone. Delete the in-between ones on a schedule, not in a panic when the disk fills.
- Note what you did. A one-line text file next to the archives — date, what was edited, which backup is the last known-good — saves real time on the bad day.
Test the restore before you need it
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup. Once, before it matters: copy a backup into a spare world slot (or a test server), load it, and fly around your main builds. Check that chests have their contents, villagers are where they should be, and nothing looks torn. If the test restore works, the same steps will work under pressure; if it does not, you have found out while it is still free to fix.
Server owners: your host’s backup is not your backup
Most hosts take automatic backups, and they are genuinely useful for small accidents. But they live on the provider’s system, under the provider’s retention window, and they vanish if the account does. Download your own full copy on a schedule — the same download as step 2 of the upload guide, run in reverse — and keep it in the 3-2-1 rotation above. The world your community built should never exist in only one company’s hands.
Make the backup a habit with a trigger: every time you open MCA Selector, a backup happens first — before a server prune, before a chunk reset, before any NBT change. The edit takes minutes; rebuilding a lost world takes forever.
Download MCA Selector 2.9
Every server-side job in this guide starts with a local edit. Get the current release from the MCA Selector download page — the Windows installer, the cross-platform .jar, the macOS .dmg and the Linux .deb/.rpm, every button pointing at the official GitHub release files with the SHA-256 checksum listed, plus a clearly labelled site mirror as a fallback. It is free and open source under the MIT licence.