Tickless Backups

Everything that changed since 0.1.0. Minecraft 26.1.x, 26.2 and 26.3 (NeoForge 26.x).

New

• Incremental backups. Backups are no longer one .zip each: files are stored by their SHA-256, so an unchanged file exists once however many backups contain it. A changed region file is stored in pieces along its chunks, so one changed chunk adds only a few KB.
• Automatic backups every N minutes and/or at fixed times of the day, skipped while nobody is online.
• In-game configuration screen (/backup gui, a key, or the pause menu), also on a dedicated server.
• Progress bar in the action bar for backups, exports, checks, uploads and downloads.
• Partial restore: /backup restore <name> only <path>... brings back a dimension, a folder or specific files, keeping every replaced file in a safety folder.
• /backup diff shows the files added, removed and changed between two backups.
• /backup full reads every file again instead of trusting size and time; /backup export writes any backup as a standalone .zip.
• Automatic verification of the backups on a schedule.
• Off-site upload to S3-compatible storage (AWS S3, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2...) or WebDAV, with retries and optional remote retention; /backup fetch brings a backup back, verified by hash.
• zstd compression as an option next to deflate (pure Java, bundled in the jar).
• Hooks: run your own command before a backup, while autosave is paused, or after it.
• Webhook notifications (Discord or generic JSON) for failures, problems found, low disk space, and optionally completed backups.
• Tab completion lists the most recent backups first and filters by name or date.
• First release for NeoForge.

Improved

• Backups are made per world, each in its own folder.
• A restore is checked when you ask for it, including that every file name can be restored and that there is enough space, instead of failing at shutdown.
• Stopping the server no longer waits long for a running backup or upload.
• Fetch and remote retention no longer share their temporary files with a running backup.
• Symbolic links and files with a name that cannot be restored are reported in the log instead of being skipped silently.
• A self-test at startup warns if the game's write queues cannot be reached on a new Minecraft version.
• Uploads use a bounded amount of memory, and an operator who joins is told about a restore left pending by a crash.

Fixed

• A race that could leave autosave off while a backup started.
• Several hardening fixes in retention, snapshot and restore, and against hostile backup or remote content (path traversal, oversized files).

Upgrading

• The login for S3 or WebDAV is never stored in a file. It is read from the environment variables TICKLESS_BACKUPS_S3_ACCESS_KEY, TICKLESS_BACKUPS_S3_SECRET_KEY, TICKLESS_BACKUPS_WEBDAV_USERNAME and TICKLESS_BACKUPS_WEBDAV_PASSWORD. A login left in an old config/tickless-backups.json is no longer read and is removed from the file.