How to restore a nuked or raided Discord server

Someone with permissions they shouldn’t have had deleted every channel, or mass banned, or handed the role hierarchy to a raid. The audit log will tell you who. It won’t undo any of it, and Discord support doesn’t restore servers.

What you can recover depends entirely on whether a backup exists. Most of what decides that happens in the hour beforehand, so this is worth reading before anything goes wrong.

If you have a backup

Work in this order. Skipping to step three is the mistake.

1. Stop it happening again first. Remove the permissions that were used, whether that’s the compromised account, the bot, or the role that turned out to include Administrator. Restoring into a server that still has the hole open just gives someone a second turn.

2. Screenshot the audit log. It’s the only record of who did what, and Discord’s retention isn’t indefinite. Do this before it ages out, whether or not you intend to report anything.

3. Restore the backup.

   /backup load backup_id: 434ATZPVLA

   /backup list finds the id. If you have interval backups on Premium, you may have up to eight. Pick the newest one from before the incident, because the most recent snapshot may already contain the damage.

4. Check permissions before announcing anything. @everyone first, then that moderator roles sit above member roles, then that your bots can still reach the channels they need. Recreated channels are new channels, so bot access doesn’t always survive.

5. Then tell people. A clear post saying what happened, what’s fixed, and what changed retains more members than silence.

Restoring only the part that broke

A full load replaces channels and roles both, which is more than you need if only one of them was hit. The options argument narrows it:

/backup load backup_id: 434ATZPVLA options: !* roles delete-roles

Roles come back and channels are untouched. To do it the other way around:

/backup load backup_id: 434ATZPVLA options: !* channels delete-channels

Valid arguments are settings members channels delete-channels roles delete-roles bans invite pins. On Premium, bans undoes a mass ban by replacing the current ban list with the backup’s.

What doesn’t come back

Members. Discord has no mechanism for restoring membership. If people were banned, lifting the bans lets them return but doesn’t bring them back. If they left, they left. Every recovered server needs an invite and an announcement.

Messages, unless you had Premium and it saved them. Free backups are structural only. Premium holds up to 250 per channel, reposted through a webhook under the original author’s name and avatar. Because they’re reposts, they carry no reactions or edit history.

Anything created after the backup. A channel added last week isn’t in a backup taken last month.

If you don’t have a backup

Then the structure is gone. There’s no API for undeleting a Discord channel. Any service claiming to restore a server it never saw beforehand is either reconstructing it from a template or describing member re-invites through OAuth.

What’s still available:

• The audit log, for the channel and role names, if the entries haven’t aged out. Tedious, but it’s a list.
• A template, if you ever published one of this server.
• Starting from a public layout. The template gallery is a faster rebuild than a blank server, and you can apply one to the server you already have.

Then set up backups.

The hour beforehand

Nukes are almost always a permissions problem rather than an attack. Three habits prevent most of them.

Stop granting Administrator. It bypasses every channel overwrite you have set, and it turns one compromised account into an empty server. Grant the specific permissions instead. Then audit which roles can manage channels, manage roles, and ban. Those three do the damage, and they accumulate quietly on roles created for something else entirely.

After that, turn on automatic backups.

/backup interval on 24h

Free keeps one rolling snapshot per server. Premium keeps up to eight, so you get a choice of restore point rather than whatever the last overwrite happened to catch.

Add Xenon and run /backup interval on 24h before you close the tab. More on what backups cover, or how to back up a server if you’re here before anything has gone wrong.