Backups: save and restore your users

The final lesson of the course: 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 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. The final 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 Pro 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.

Course complete 🎉

You now know the whole system:

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, torrents, split tunneling.
Multihop — server chains.
Monitoring — self-checks, the mesh network, and self-healing.
Backups — your user base, safe and sound.

What's next? If you haven't connected your first server yet, start with the setup guide. And when questions come up about specific apps, check out the guides for the Happ app and the OpenWRT and Keenetic routers.