Panel

Backups

Learn how to create and manage incremental backups of your applications.

Backups

Backups allow you to save your application's files and restore them if something goes wrong. LBC uses an incremental backup system that saves storage space.

Only the server owner can manage backups. Collaborators cannot create or restore backups.

How Incremental Backups Work

Unlike traditional backups that copy all files every time, incremental backups only store the changes since the last backup. This means:

  • Faster backups: Only new or modified files are saved
  • Less storage used: Unchanged files are not duplicated
  • More snapshots: You can keep more restore points without running out of space

Each backup creates a "snapshot" - a complete picture of your files at that moment. Even though only changes are stored, you can restore any snapshot as if it were a full backup.

Storage and Limits

Backups are limited by storage space, not by the number of backups. You can see your usage at the top of the backups page showing how much of your allocated backup storage is used.

There is a hard limit of 100 snapshots to prevent abuse. This should be more than enough for most use cases when combined with a good retention policy.

Creating a Snapshot

Click the Create Snapshot button to create a new backup of your current files. The snapshot will capture the state of all your application files at that moment.

Snapshot Actions

Each snapshot has a context menu with the following options:

  • Restore: Restores the entire snapshot, replacing your current files with the backed up versions. Your server is stopped while the restore runs.
  • Restore Settings: Restores your server's editable configuration variables from the snapshot without touching your files. See Restore Settings.
  • Browse: Opens a file manager popup where you can browse the snapshot's files, preview them, and download individual files or folders.
  • Download: Downloads the snapshot as an archive file.
  • Lock / Unlock: Protects the snapshot from automatic deletion by the cleanup policy. Locked snapshots are never removed by scheduled cleanups.
  • Delete: Permanently deletes the snapshot. Locked snapshots must be unlocked first.

Browsing Snapshots

The Browse feature opens a file manager interface for the selected snapshot. From here you can:

  • Move through folders
  • Preview files
  • Download individual files or folders
  • Restore specific files or folders without restoring the entire snapshot

This is useful when you only need to recover a specific configuration file or folder rather than rolling back everything.

Quick Restore

When you select Quick Restore on a file or folder (either from the browse view or from the file manager), you can see all available versions of that item across your snapshots.

Each version shows:

  • When it was backed up
  • File size
  • Tags like Snapshot (the version in the selected snapshot) or Current (the version currently in use)

You can choose to:

  • Restore to original location: Replaces the current file with the selected version
  • Restore to custom path: Saves the restored file to a different location

Restore Settings

Every snapshot also captures your server's editable configuration variables (the settings you can change for your server). Restore Settings lets you roll those variables back to the values saved in a snapshot, without restoring any files.

Choosing Restore Settings on a snapshot shows you which variables would be restored. Values that are invalid, or that are no longer part of your server's template (legacy), are not accepted and are skipped. They still appear in the list so you can review them.

Confirm with Restore Settings to write the accepted values back into your server's configuration. This only updates your editable variables. It does not change your files or restart the server.

Backup Cleanup

Backups are cleaned up automatically based on a retention limit you control. In the retention panel, set Keep last to the number of snapshots to keep, between 1 and 100 (7 by default). Once you have more than this many automatic snapshots, the oldest ones are pruned.

Locked snapshots are exempt from cleanup. They never count against the retention limit and are never automatically deleted. Use locks to preserve important snapshots.

Saving a retention limit sets up a daily cleanup that runs automatically and appears on your Schedules page. You can also delete unlocked snapshots manually at any time.

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