Minecraft Java Edition – Is It Possible to Script Minecraft?

My recommended solution for this kind of thing tends to be "Use The System!".

If you have the option, enabling Time Machine from system preferences to create a full disk backup every hour is usually a good idea, and if you don't have the opportunity, you might want to consider getting an external disk and implementing that approach.

If that is completely out of the question for whatever reason, the alternative is using cron.

Setting up the interval running is easy enough, a simple man crontab should give you the information you need on that; but having a script to actually do the backup might be useful:

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Desktop/MinecraftServer # or the path to your minecraft server directory
rm -rf world.bak
cp -r world world.bak

Save this as a "minecraft_server_backup.sh" and chmod +x it.

This particular script only keeps the most recent backup, and additionally, it doesn't actually check if the server is running before making a backup.

It is not yet updated to the latest version of Minecraft (currently still on 1.6.2) but Single Player Commands basically takes a lot of cheaty commands and adds them in single-player mode.

If you install this, use the command /health infinite

You now get 'hit' as normal, can be killed by insta-death effects like falling into the Void, but otherwise have infinite HP.

For 1.7.9 there is MrChris' GodMode mode which does much the same thing.