Pterodactyl Backup Retention

Backup Retention cleans up old server backups for you. Set a few rules once, and every hour the extension goes through all servers and deletes the backups that fall outside of them. Locked backups are never touched, and there's a dry-run mode so you can check what it would do first.

Why Out of the box, Pterodactyl only rotates backups when a scheduled backup task runs and the server is already at its backup limit. Everything else is up to your users. In practice that means:

• backups pile up until the limit is reached, then manual backups fail with "too many backups"
• old backups never expire
• disk usage on your nodes or your S3 bucket keeps growing

Features

• Keep newest X: keeps the X most recent backups of each server
• Maximum age: deletes backups older than X days
• Always keep at least X: safety net, a server never drops below this number
• Locked backups are never deleted and don't count towards the limits
• Failed and running backups are ignored
• Dry-run mode to see what would be deleted before anything happens
• Every deletion shows up in the server's activity log, so users know why a backup is gone
• Offline nodes are skipped and retried on the next run
• Works with Wings (local) and S3 backups, deletion goes through Pterodactyl's own backup service
• No core files are modified

Requirements

• Pterodactyl Panel 1.15.x
• Blueprint (beta-2026-08 or newer)
• PHP 8.2+

Installation

• Upload backupretention.blueprint to /var/www/pterodactyl
• Run blueprint -install backupretention
• Open Admin > Extensions > Backup Retention
• The extension is disabled and in dry-run mode after installing, so nothing happens until you turn it on.

Example With keep newest 2, max age 30 days, always keep at least 1:

• Backup Age Result
• backup-5 today kept
• backup-4 2 days kept
• backup-3 10 days deleted
• backup-2 (locked) 20 days kept
• backup-1 40 days deleted

Support

Full documentation is included in the download (README.md). If something doesn't work, send me the output of php artisan backupretention:run and I'll take a look.