2026 has been the harshest year on record for community realms: Stormforge closed on May 14, Turtle WoW on May 15 under a permanent injunction and settlement, and Project Ascension's WoW realms went offline on September 4 after what the team called a "mutual agreement" with Blizzard. Project Epoch received a cease-and-desist.

In none of those cases was there character migration. Ascension's agreement required removing all WoW-related material from its platforms, so there was no archive, no export and no transfer path. That is the structural reality of community realms, and it means the useful time to prepare is before a closure announcement — not after.

What actually lives on your computer

Almost everything people worry about losing is server-side, and almost everything that is not gets ignored until it is gone. The split is worth knowing precisely.

The version rule is the one that catches people. A 3.3.5a WTF folder will not carry usefully into a 1.12.1 Vanilla client, or vice versa — the folder structure and addon APIs differ. Moving between two WotLK realms is a copy; moving between expansions is mostly a rebuild.

The backup checklist

Ten minutes now, run once per realm you actually play on:

• Copy the whole client folder or at minimum Interface/, WTF/, Screenshots/ and Logs/ (_retail_/… for modern clients). Keep the copy off the drive the game runs from.
• Zip it and date the archive — wow-335a-backup-2026-09-15.zip. A single compressed file is far harder to lose than a folder tree you half-copied.
• Back up macros and keybinds separately. Macros live in WTF/Account/<account>/macros-cache.txt and keybinds in bindings-cache.wtf. These are the two files people miss most, and they are the cheapest to save.
• Export your addon profiles through the addon itself where it supports it, and copy SavedVariables regardless.
• Write down your character list — realm, name, class, level, profession pairings — in a plain text file. You cannot recover a character, but you can rebuild one faster from a list than from memory.
• Screenshot your gear, talents and bank tabs. Two minutes of screenshots is the only durable record of what you had.
• Save your guild's contact channel if you want to find those people again. Discord servers usually outlive realms; in-game mail does not.
• Do not rely on third-party "character archive" websites. No external site can read a realm's database. At best they hold screenshots you sent them.

Moving to another realm

If you are re-rolling, three things are worth doing properly rather than fast:

1. Match the client version first. Decide between a 1.12.1 Vanilla, 2.4.3 TBC or 3.3.5a WotLK experience before downloading, because that determines whether any of your backup is reusable. Our expansion-by-expansion selection guide covers the trade-offs.
2. Keep clients in separate folders. Never point a new realm's launcher at your existing client directory — custom patches and modified files from one project routinely break another.
3. Register with a unique password. Not your Battle.net password, not your email password, not the password from the realm that just closed. Reuse is the single most exploited mistake in this scene; CISA's guidance on unique credentials and multi-factor authentication applies exactly here.

Expect the scams that follow every closure

Large closures reliably produce a wave of fake recovery sites. Recognise the pattern:

• Anything offering character transfer, character restore, or a "backup database" from a closed realm is not real. Realm data is not public and no closed project has a migration service.
• Anything asking for Battle.net credentials is phishing. A realmlist address never requires them.
• Anything instructing you to disable your antivirus or security software before installing is malicious, full stop.
• Anything demanding payment for "pre-registration" of your old character name on a successor realm is unaffiliated with the project it names.

When in doubt, verify through the destination realm's own live channels and treat every directory listing, forum post and search ad as an unverified claim. Our community realm evaluation checklist covers the full pre-join process.

The mindset that saves the most pain

Treat any community realm as a rental with no notice period. Keep your backups current, keep your password unique, and keep a copy of the screenshots you would hate to lose. A realm can end with a single Discord post — Turtle WoW, Stormforge and Ascension all did — and the difference between a bad week and a lost decade is whether you copied a folder last month.