How to Back-up and import worlds in Minecraft on Windows 10

Updated: 3/29/2023

Importing and exporting worlds can be useful for many things, whether you want to share a copy of your world with a friend, or if you want to make backups of your worlds for safekeeping.

It’s also important to create backups for world saves before installing pre-release versions of Minecraft. Worlds opened or modified in pre-release versions of Minecraft can destroy them, and compatibility with release versions of the game is never guaranteed.

Whatever your reasons for doing so may be, creating backups of worlds in Minecraft for Windows 10 is very easy. 

Minecraft (Bedrock) for Windows 10

The Bedrock edition of Minecraft for Windows 10 has built-in export/import functions that make it especially easy to create backups of worlds.

Minecraft for Windows 10 will export worlds to a single file using the .MCWORLD file format. You can upload, send, or share your exported MCWORLD file anywhere you’d like.

To Export an MCWORLD file:

To Export an MCWORLD file, navigate to the world list and locate the world you want to export. To the right of the worlds name on the world list, click the “edit” button.

Scroll to the very bottom of the “Game Settings” pane on the right and click “EXPORT”. A File Explorer window will appear. Navigate to where you want a copy of your world saved, give it a name, then click “Export”.

Minecraft will let you know when it finishes exporting a copy of your world. Exporting may take some time, depending on how big your world is.

To Import an MCWORLD file:

When you’re ready to import a world back into the game, navigate to the world list from the title screen. Click on the “Import” Button to the right of the “Create New” button. A File Explorer window will appear.

Navigate to where you have an MCWORLD file saved to your PC, click it, then click “Import”. Again, it may take some time to import your world.

Minecraft Java Edition (Windows 10)

The process of creating world backups is a little different in Minecraft Java Edition. In this version of the game, you have to navigate to the game’s directory and manage world saves directly. Because of this, you don’t have to launch the game when importing or creating backups of worlds.

How to locate Minecraft Java Edition World Saves:

You can use Windows Search to locate the Minecraft Java Edition Saves folder. To do this, click the Windows Search box on the taskbar. Type “%appdata%”, then click on the folder that appears in the search results.

In the File Explorer window that appears, navigate to the “.minecraft” folder, then to the “saves” folder. Now that you’re in the saves folder, you can see all your Minecraft worlds listed as folders.

To create a backup, right-click a folder and select ‘copy’. Next, navigate to a different location on your PC where you want to save the copy. Then, right-click a blank area in the window and select ‘paste’.

A copy of your Minecraft world will be created in the new location, which may take some time, depending on how large your world is. To load a backup world, simply place the world folder you want to import into the saves folder.

It’s always a good idea to create backups of worlds that are important to you, just in case something happens. For extra precaution, I would recommend uploading your backups somewhere outside of your PC, such as with removable media or in the cloud.