In games, losing something you’ve been working on for hours, days, weeks, months, or even years is undeniably frustrating.
Minecraft is one of those games. Mojang’s sandbox title allows players to develop worlds for quite some time. Not only do these contain someone’s overall progress in the game, but this is where all of their blood, sweat, tears and effort is stored. And it would really hurt if a Minecraft player lost their created world.
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How to recover a deleted Minecraft world
To ensure that you can easily recover your Minecraft worlds, be sure to back up your worlds. In Bedrock Edition, select the pencil edit button next to the world in the main menu. Go to Game and scroll down to Copy World. This will ensure that you can always go back to that copied version if your original file becomes damaged or deleted. For Java Edition, simply copy the folder for the world to your PC or drive.
If you haven’t created a backup version of your Minecraft world, things are much more complicated. Worlds are stored locally on your device, so if you delete them from your console or PC, they can be difficult to recover. If you are using a PC, you can try the following process:
Step 1: Check the Recycle Bin
In most cases, the first step to restore deleted files on Windows 10/11 is to check the trash. However, once a Minecraft world is deleted from the Trash (or once the Trash is emptied), this data recovery method is no longer relevant.
Therefore, Recycle Bin recovery is not possible in this scenario and the only way to find a missing or deleted Minecraft world is to look into the available backups or use a data recovery software tool.
What to do when your Minecraft world is deleted
One of the problems with this particular question is that over the past nine years, Minecraft has gone through countless versions and spin-offs, and the original build-focused version of the game ported to every hardware platform that couldn’t run fast enough.
Trying to get an answer from the internet to even a seemingly simple Minecraft question can mean wading through years of outdated, irrelevant, or counterintuitive information.
How to manually backup Minecraft Worlds on Windows:
- Press Windows key + R to open Run.
- Type %appdata% and press Enter.
- Go to .minecraft.