Backing Up and Restoring Your Foundry Data

Disaster Recovery Strategy

Foundry VTT campaigns represent hundreds of hours of creative writing, map layout, actor sheet customization, and journal entries. Establishing an automated backup workflow ensures your campaign data survives hardware failures, corrupted database writes, or faulty module updates.

Because Foundry strictly isolates user assets inside /foundry-data/, you only need to protect that directory. The application runtime (/foundry-app/) is stateless and can be reinstalled at any time.

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Method 1: DustBowl Warden Snapshots (Recommended)

DustBowl Warden includes point-in-time snapshot capabilities that freeze your entire container filesystem:

1. In the DustBowl Warden dashboard, select your Foundry instance.
2. Click the Snapshots tab.
3. Click Create Snapshot. Provide a descriptive label (e.g. pre-session-42-backup or pre-v14-upgrade).
4. Warden captures the container volume state instantly without requiring manual file archiving.

Automating Scheduled Backups

To protect against accidental mid-week corruption:

1. Open the Schedules tab in DustBowl Warden.
2. Create a schedule executing daily at off-peak hours (e.g. 0 4 * * *).
3. Add a task using the Create Snapshot action.
4. Set retention policies to cycle older snapshots automatically.

Plan maintenance schedules alongside campaign milestones using our Wipe and Maintenance Schedule Builder.

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Method 2: Manual Cold Storage Backups via SFTP

To maintain offsite backups on your local computer or secondary cloud storage:

1. Stop the server in DustBowl Warden to ensure LevelDB databases are cleanly flushed to disk.
2. Connect to DustBowl Warden using SFTP (port 2022).
3. Download the entire /foundry-data/ folder (or create an archive via the Web File Manager).
4. Store the archive securely with date-stamped naming:

   foundry-backup-2026-10-21.tar.gz
   

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Restoring from a Backup

If a world database becomes corrupted or a bad module damages campaign state:

Restoring via DustBowl Warden Snapshot:

1. In the Snapshots tab, find your preferred snapshot.
2. Click Restore.
3. Confirm the rollback. Warden replaces the current filesystem with the snapshot state and reboots the container.

Restoring via SFTP / File Archive:

1. Stop the Foundry VTT server in DustBowl Warden.
2. Open the File Manager and remove the damaged world directory:

   Data/worlds/<world-name>/
   

3. Upload your backup archive into Data/worlds/.
4. Extract the backup archive using the File Manager.
5. Verify folder permissions and restart the server.

Related Guides and Tools

• Wipe and Maintenance Schedule Builder
• Updating Foundry VTT
• Managing Worlds, Game Systems, and Modules
• Deploying Foundry VTT in DustBowl Warden