Summary
Automatic saves and automatic backups are two distinct features available on Minecraft servers. Automatic saves are a standard game feature and occur at regular intervals, typically every few minutes. On the other hand, automatic backups take periodic snapshots of the game world and save them to a separate location, such as a cloud storage service or a local hard drive.
Difference between Automatic Saves and Automatic Backups on a Minecraft Server
Automatic Saves
- A moment-in-time backup for when crashes happen, kill commands are issued, or power failures.
- Without this, a server would start up on day one every time it turns off and back on again.
- Turned on by default by BisectHosting.
- Runs the /save command on the server every 5-10 minutes (default for BisectHosting servers is 5 minutes).
- Saves the world and overwrites the previous save file.
- Mostly used when the server crashes. After a crash, the latest autosave is used to restore the world and player data.
- Cannot be accessed directly and, for most server owners, does not need to be changed from the default values.
Automatic Backups
- Run through BisectHosting's website and has no impact on server performance.
- Often used to restore the server to a state before corruption has occurred, grief has happened, or a mod or plugin has corrupted the server.
- BisectHosting provides daily backups as part of the Premium server plans or as an addon for Budget server owners.
- Backups zip up the entire server's files from the day it is saved exactly as they were.
- Mainly used after a server has too many problems to fix individually and can restore the server to a stable state before any issues through the Backup Manager.
- BisectHosting saves seven days worth of backups for each server. 
