How to Trim and Manage Your Minecraft Server's Storage

How to Trim and Manage Your Server's Storage

Over time, your Minecraft server's storage can fill up with large world files, old backups, and plugin data.

When your storage gets full, it can prevent new backups from being created and may impact performance. This guide will show you the most effective ways to safely trim your storage space.

CRITICAL: Backup Your Server Before You Begin

Before deleting any files, it is absolutely essential that you take a full backup of your server.

This will serve as your safety net in case you accidentally delete the wrong files. Please follow our guide on How to Create and Restore a Server Backup before proceeding.

Method 1: Pruning Your World with MCA Selector (Advanced)

The largest portion of your storage is usually the world folder itself, specifically from chunks that were explored once and never visited again. Using an external tool called MCA Selector, you can delete these unused chunks.

1. Download Your World: Stop your server and use an FTP client to download your world folder to your computer.
2. Download MCA Selector: Go to the official MCA Selector GitHub page and download the latest version for your operating system.
3. Load Your World: Open MCA Selector and go to "File > Open" to select your world folder. You will see a top-down map of your world.

4. Select and Delete Chunks: Use the selection tools to highlight chunks. A common technique is to go to "Tools > Filter Chunks" and filter by "InhabitedTime". You can select all chunks that players have spent less than 1 minute in, for example. Once selected, go to "Selection > Delete selected chunks" to prune them.

5. Re-upload Your World: After saving the changes in MCA Selector, compress your modified world folder into a .zip file and follow our guide to upload and decompress it on your server.

Method 2: Clearing Plugin and Log Data

Some plugins and old log files can also consume a lot of space.

• BlueMap and Dynmap: If you use these plugins, its rendered map tiles can be huge. You can clear a map by using their purge commands.
• Log Files: In your "File Manager", navigate to the /logs folder. You can safely delete old, gzipped log files (e.g., those ending in .log.gz) that are more than a few days old.

Conclusion

Regularly managing your server's storage is a key part of healthy server maintenance.

By starting with the easy step of clearing old backups and then moving on to more advanced techniques like world pruning, you can ensure your server has plenty of room to grow.