Backups: save and restore your users
Why you should back up your user base, how to set up automatic copies to Google Drive or S3, and how to restore from a backup.
Throughout the first part of the course we've talked about infrastructure: servers can be recreated, routes rebuilt, masters replaced with a swap. The only thing that's truly irreplaceable is your users: their accounts, limits, and the keys their apps connect with. This lesson is about protecting that asset.
What exactly gets backed up
A backup saves the user list of each cluster:
- accounts (name, subscription token);
- traffic limits and used volumes;
- expiry dates and statuses;
- the secret proxy identifiers — thanks to them, your users' already-configured apps keep connecting after a restore as if nothing happened.
Servers and topology (nodes, inbounds, routes) are not part of the backup — that configuration lives in CreateYourVPN and is managed for you. Backups are about people.
To your own storage, always encrypted
Copies don't go "somewhere on our side" — they go to your own storage: Google Drive or any S3-compatible service (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi). Even if something happens to CreateYourVPN, your user base stays with you.
Every file is encrypted before it's uploaded: anyone with access to your drive or bucket can't extract users from a copy. Keys and encryption are handled by the system — there's nothing to configure.
You set the schedule once: frequency from every 6 hours to once a week, retention of old copies up to 365 days with automatic cleanup.
Backups are a Max feature. You'll find it in the panel under account menu → "Backups".
Restoring
You can restore to two destinations:
- To a CreateYourVPN cluster — the standard scenario: pick a copy, and the system imports the users idempotently (re-importing the same copy won't create duplicates).
- To a "vanilla" Marzban — the escape hatch for the absolute worst case: a copy is readable outside CreateYourVPN too, so your data is never locked into the platform.
Step-by-step guides
Detailed setup guides live in a dedicated section of the academy:
Backups overview
How backups work: what's saved, encryption, frequency, and retention.
Backup to Google Drive
Getting a Client ID, Client Secret, and Refresh Token and connecting your Google Drive.
Backup to S3 storage
AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, or Wasabi: keys, bucket, endpoint, region.
Restore from a backup
Bringing users back into a cluster — or moving them to a vanilla Marzban.
Part one complete
You now know the infrastructure inside out:
- Terminology — cluster, server, route, inbound, and how they fit together.
- Clusters — the master, the nodes, and the swap.
- Servers — what happens during installation and what the metrics mean.
- Routes — what the user sees and how balancing works.
- Inbounds — masquerading, blocking, split tunneling.
- Multihop — server chains.
- Monitoring — self-checks, the mesh network, and self-healing.
- Backups — your user base, safe and sound.
Ahead is part two — clients and money: the Users, Customization, Plans, Monetization, and Billing sections of the panel.