Advanced Usage

This page assumes you already know how to use git. If you don’t, you should skip it.

Disabling file updates

FastBack automatically performs updates to some key git files in your world repo. Advanced users can disable these updates by changing the repo’s git configuration:

Config Key Use
fastback.update-gitignore-enabled Defaults to true. Set to false to disable automatic updates to the root .gitignore
fastback.update-gitattributes-enabled Defaults to true. Set to false to disable automatic updates to the root .gitattributes

For example, running

git config fastback.update-gitignore-enabled false

in your world folder will disable .gitignore updates.

Be aware that you might miss out on future optimizations or bug fixes in these files; by disabling the updates, you take full responsibility for maintaining them. As an alternative, you might want to consider adding custom .gitignore or .gitattributes files in subdirectories and letting FastBack continue to auto-update the root files.

World UUID

FastBack tries to stop you from mixing remote backup snapshots from different worlds. This is generally a bad idea both in terms of staying organized and backup performance.

If you want to live dangerously, you can view or change the UUID of a world by looking at a file in you world save directory: fastback/world.uuid.

Manually Restoring a Remote Snapshot

FastBack backups are just regular git repos. This means you can use the terminal and the git command line tool to interact with them.

To restore from a remote manually using git:

  1. Install git. Mac and Linux users should already have it; Windows users may need to go here.

  2. Clone the backup repo and list snapshots

git clone [repo-url]
cd [directory that just got created]
git branch

This will list all of your available snapshot branches:

snapshots/12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678/2022-10-02_12_56_33
snapshots/12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678/2022-10-07_11_49_31

To retrieve one of them, type:

git checkout snapshots/12345678-1234-5678-1234-567812345678/2022-10-02_12_56_33

Your world save files will appear in the directory. You can then copy them into your minecraft installation.

Notes for Dedicated Servers:

By default, Fastback will broadcast a message when a backup is about to start, so players know that things might get choppy for a bit.

You can configure this in [worlddir]/.git/config:

[fastback]
	broadcast-notice-enabled = true
	broadcast-notice-message = My custom message.

Debugging

If things go haywire, you can run

/backup set force-debug-enabled true

to temporarily send debugging output to the minecraft logs. This can be useful in tracking down problems.