Preparing Your Backup for Upload

Find your save folder.

Open File Explorer and go to wherever you installed your Palworld dedicated server. Inside it, navigate to:

Inside that folder you'll see one folder with a long string of letters and numbers as its name, that's your world. There should only be one.

Open PowerShell right there.

Still inside that long-named folder (so you can see Level.sav and a Players folder), hold Shift and right-click on empty space inside the folder. Choose "Open PowerShell window here" (or "Open Terminal here" on Windows 11).

Run this command.

Paste this into the window that opened and press Enter:

A file called my-backup.tar.gz will appear in that same folder in a few seconds. That's the file you upload.

Find your save folder.

Press Windows key + R, type the following exactly, and press Enter:

You'll see a folder named after a long number (your Steam ID). Open it, then open the single world folder inside. You should now see Level.sav and a Players folder.

Open PowerShell right there.

Hold Shift and right-click on empty space inside that folder. Choose "Open PowerShell window here" (or "Open Terminal here" on Windows 11).

Run this command.

A file called my-backup.tar.gz will appear in that folder. That's the file you upload.

Find your save folder automatically.

Different installs put things in different places, so instead of guessing, run this from your home directory, it searches for you and skips the automatic backup copies Palworld makes on its own:

This prints one or more full paths ending in Level.sav. If you only see one, that's your world. If you see more than one, pick the one whose path matches where your actual running server is installed (or if unsure, the one that looks most recently used).

Package it.

Take the path you found, but drop the Level.sav at the end, that folder is what you need. Run this (replace the example path with your real one):

This creates my-backup.tar.gz in your home directory.

Download it to your computer.

From your own PC (not the server), open PowerShell (Windows) or Terminal (Mac), and run:

Replace your-key.pem, username, and your-server-ip with your own actual details. If you're not sure what these are, whoever set up your server can tell you, or check your hosting provider's connection details.

Log into your old host's panel and open your server, then go to the Files tab.

Navigate into Pal/Saved/SaveGames/0/, then into the one long-named folder inside it.

Select everything inside that folder (usually a "select all" option, or a checkbox at the top), and look for a Compress or Archive option, choose .tar.gz if given a choice. If only .zip is offered, download that instead and follow the "Windows — Singleplayer" steps above on the extracted contents to convert it to .tar.gz.

Download the resulting file, that's what you'll upload.