Can we manually reduce the file size of Minecraft SMP server by just deleting .mcr files?

Question

We had an "accident" with WorldEdit and despite having BoarderGuard installed it sent a tunnel thousands of chunks away. Regardless now the map looks ridiculous. Of course the servercraft.co server crashed during this process and we were robbed of doing a simple /undo!

The worst part is, we did not notice the problem until a few days later and the several dozen players on our server would be a tad irked if we had to roll back the server a week.

I have read that deleting chunks etc is totally possible with MCedit. But since we chose to go with Servercraft, dowloading, editing offline, and then trying to reinsert the file back to servercraft is almost a nightmare scenerio. We have Bukkit running, and we are using a mod called BorderGuard so I know exactly what regions we are using. I was just curious if anyone understands what happens when you just delete .mcr files from the /world/region folder? Do they go away permanently?

I do see that if we were ever to expand the BorderGuard those regions/chunks would come back the same since the seed is the same.

Anyone manually lop off part of their world and survived?

Answer 1

If you can identify exactly which .mcr files you want to delete, you should be able to delete them with no damage done to the rest of the map. Once someone else ventures out there (when you increase the border range), it will simply generate those chunks like they were before, as if it was the first time the chunks were getting generated (using the same seed and all).