Community Suggestion: Import Backup Worlds into new Worlds
Import Backup Worlds into new Worlds
What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?
The ability to either copy or restore a backup of one of your worlds back into the system. There are times where you want to branch off on a world you created and make some changes but you also don't want to manually create and copy every single page into the new world from the older one.
How does this feature request address the current situation?
Having this ability you can create a saved backup of one of your worlds and then import it as a new one to change in World Anvil
What are other uses for this feature request?
Easy way to move content between worlds without having to completely redo each page.
Follow up
I know this might seem like an irrelevant problem to many. But if you ever find yourself staring at a CSV file with 8,000 entries and someone tells you that you have to add all of it manually, you’ll be very glad you upvoted this post.
Since there's currently no official way to import a backup or CSV into a new world, I’ve been thinking about building a small personal tool to automate this process — but only if it's allowed. The plan would be to read my exported CSV file and use browser automation (e.g., Playwright or Puppeteer) to log into my World Anvil account and recreate each article by simulating the manual creation process (filling in title, type, content, and saving the page). That said, I don’t want to break any terms of service or create unintended problems for the platform. So before I even start, I wanted to ask: Is something like this permitted? If not, I’ll of course leave it be. If there's any recommended or alternative way to restore/export/import world data more efficiently, I’d love to hear it.
The Team's Response
Thanks for the suggestion! Importing a world is a good idea, but due to low interest we're closing this for now. Note that it should be possible to import an exported world through the API if you have coding skills, as the export includes JSON files.
Current score
9/300 Votes · +2000 points
Votes Cast
-
+300
by Thevipper
on 2025-05-11 16:43 -
+100
by TerminusV
on 2025-05-11 06:55 -
+300
by DragonHeart[8787]
on 2025-05-04 02:16Yes, the 'move articles to different world' feature i've found has no way to only move a duplicate, which is annoying.
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+100
by Exhausted Archivist
on 2025-05-02 05:16 -
+300
by kerahope
on 2025-04-25 17:46 -
+300
by Charlotte and Clara
on 2025-04-23 22:35 -
+300
by DMFW
on 2025-04-23 18:24I like the idea of this. Maybe there could be problems with versioning as the site software changes but I'd have thought those wouldn't be show stoppers. Would need some kind of batch function for big worlds to restore as a background task probably.
-
+100
by kaixabu
on 2025-04-23 12:22I know this would be difficult but tbh, having a true copy for a sandbox would be great!
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-100
by GMSeth
on 2025-04-22 23:05 -
+300
by Drosa
on 2025-04-22 21:28
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