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Sorry in advance, this question could fall into 1 of 3 categories (server admin, gaming, or programming)

I'm working on a personal Minecraft server for my friends and I, I'm having the server back itself up on an interval, which requires the commands save-all and save-off to be called in succession before creating the backup file. (afterwards, save-on is called to put everything back to normal)

I'm monitoring the server's output/log to determine when the saving is off so I can create the backup. However, the server's response to my save-off command indicates it is ready, but when I go to make a backup, the world files are modified again, breaking my backup.

So far, my only solution is to add a delay between save-off and backup, but surely I'm either missing something or I can report this to Mojang so it can be handled a bit better. FWIW, I get the same behavior both on the latest stable version, as well as the latest snapshot.

Do save-off or save-all give any other sort of indication as to whether they are fully completed?

NOTICE I've created a bug-tracker issue with Mojang, we'll see what they have to say. :)

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11
  • How do you send those commands to the server?
    – Bobby
    Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 18:41
  • I'm writing to stdin for the minecraft_server.jar process
    – Dominic Barnes
    Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 20:01
  • Did you try the save-off, then save-all order? That's what I'm using (with a 10 sec delay between save-all and the tar call, good enough for me).
    – Maerlyn
    Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 20:40
  • save-off first? Hmm, I'll give that a try!
    – Dominic Barnes
    Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 21:20
  • Fantastic! Calling save-off before save-all was exactly what I needed to do! Please add this as an answer so I can give you some rep. :)
    – Dominic Barnes
    Commented Jun 28, 2012 at 21:30

3 Answers 3

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7

You should call save-off first, save-all afterwards. This makes sure the world gets completely saved, and no save will occur during the creation of you backup.

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0

Try deleting session.lock, as it's generated each time the world is loaded. If you are running a server, you must restart the server after deleting the session.lock file. If you're running Minecraft, you should re-log for the changes to take effect. By re-log I mean to exit to the title screen and then reload the world.

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-1

Dominic, you were doing the right thing and in the correct order:

'save-all'; 'save-off'; Wait some time (say, 30 seconds, or more); Do the backup; 'save-on'

As far as I know, there is no way around the waiting. You either have to monitor the writing to the "world" directory by some filesystem event tool (inotify(7)) or wait for a fixed duration before backing up the data.

Doing 'save-off' first, as proposed by some here, is just wrong, as it disables the saving operations in 'save-all'; see e.g. http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/support/server-support/server-administration/1892430-save-off-breaks-save-all

In many cases you might not notice a difference, since the world is pretty frequently synced by auto-saving, anyway.

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