Managing Backups & Snapshots

Disaster Recovery is a core feature of Ray Hosting. We provide robust tools to manage tiered Server Files Snapshots and Database Dumps (MySQL).

Automated Retention Tiers

To ensure data safety without manually filling up storage space, Ray Hosting implements a tiered snapshot schedule running directly within your game container:

• Daily: Runs every day at your configured time of day. We retain the last 7 daily snapshots.
• Weekly: Runs automatically every Sunday at 02:00 UTC. We retain the last 4 weekly snapshots.
• Monthly: Runs automatically on the 1st of every month at 03:00 UTC. We retain the last 3 monthly snapshots.

Expired snapshots are automatically pruned to save storage slot limits.

Setting Your Backup Time

You can configure when your daily snapshot triggers:

1. Go to the Backups tab under server management.
2. Click Schedule at the top right of the Snapshots card.
3. Select your preferred daily Time (in your local timezone).
4. Save the changes. The system automatically converts this to UTC and applies a slight, staggered minute offset. This staggering ensures that co-located servers do not trigger backups simultaneously, protecting your instance from disk I/O performance spikes.

MySQL Database Backups

If your game server supports MySQL, database dumps are also backed up automatically:

• Daily Dumps: The system captures and retains the last 4 daily database dumps (taken automatically at midnight).
• Weekly Dumps: Every Sunday, the dump is promoted and we retain the last 2 weekly database dumps.

Downloading Backups

We recommend downloading copies of your backups to your local machine:

• Via SFTP: Connect to your game server container using the credentials in the File Manager tab.
• Navigate to the /backups directory to download your snapshots (.tar.gz / .txt files) or database dumps directly.

Restoring Data

• Server Files: Select the snapshot from the relevant tab (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) and click Restore. This will rollback the container directory to that exact state.
• Databases: Under the Database Dumps card, locate your desired backup under the Daily or Weekly slots and click Restore DB.