Server Backups Not Working

[saltymalt]

Situation: For information, my friend and I share the server that she owns. The last time the server was on, I was there alone and I died right before disconnecting. To prevent our progress from completely being erased, she had a backup and uploaded it. I didn't enter the server afterwards. A few days later we added more mods and as I entered the server, it had completely restarted and was back to Autumn Day 1 no matter how many times we reloaded the backup. We tried loading it in without the new mods and another time without mods entirely and in both times it still went back to Autumn Day 1.

The mods were installed by putting the workshop IDs through the mod folder in SteamCMD first. Then, she copied a new modoverrides.lua from a new cluster that was made with the old mods with the old mod + new mods and deleted the ones from our present server.

Message from Server Owner: 

"Hi there! Friend here. I installed the new mods (gnome variety, extra emotes, walter bee movie script) to a dedicated server with already existing mods. I wasn't sure how the procedure with adding new ones was, so I did it like you would when starting up a new dedicated server.

I added the Workshop IDs in the dedicated_server_mods_setup.lua, started a new world with all the mods, and replaced the old modoverrides.lua file with the one from the new cluster in both the Master and Caves folders. 

Thank you in advanced for helping out or viewing this thread! Incredibly desperate to restore this world."

[Daniel86268]

This sounds like the last backup ran after the world reset, at which point you overwrote the old map with the new one in the backup. Unless you have another backup stored somewhere with the old map, you'll probably be out of luck.

I'd recommend to keep a few versions in stock, so if you run in the situation, where the backup script overwrites an older backup, you still have others versions left.

An easy way to achieve this would be to add a date to the backup files, so every time the backup runs you'll get a new file.

[saltymalt]

The backup was actually written around an hour before the reset happened. Would anyone know if there's any fix to this?

[myxal]

Ask your friend to load the backup without starting the cluster, and check the contents of {Master,Caves}/save/session/<some_id> - you should see:

• The ID may (and likely will) differ between the shards - that's OK
• Each shard should only have 1 session
• within each session folder, you should have 5 pairs of files (or 'number of snapshots', if you changed that), named with consecutive numbers, like:

  0000002515
  0000002515.meta
  0000002516
  0000002516.meta
  0000002517
  0000002517.meta
  0000002518
  0000002518.meta
  0000002519
  0000002519.meta

  and also a folder for each player that ever entered the cluster/shard.

• The player folder should also contain file pairs like <number> and <number>.meta, but the number may differ from the number of snapshots, and may not be consecutive - as long as there's at least one pair, that player should have their state saved.

 

If all of these are as I described, and you're still getting a new worldgen when you launch the cluster, check the files again and report what you see.

My guess is that saveindex file didn't get backed up (or got corrupted somehow), the game generated a new one, and RNG doesn't hit the session ID it generated last time (of course it doesn't - that's the point of randomness). That's still recoverable - just edit each saveindex to reference you old session IDs.

[angelshaven76]

myxal you're a world save literally . Thank you for the info.