Backup and Disaster Recovery for Monero Fork

Question

For a clone of Monero in a production environment, what files/directories to be backed up and and what intervals?

Answer 1

Once you have lots of people using your cryptocurrency, you can back up nothing at all (I'm talking about not backing up your seed nodes. If you have a wallet, you'll want to keep the mnemonic seed for that backed up, of course. And you'll want to keep a safe copy of your passwords/private keys that are used for connecting to the server via SSH and for logging in to your server hosting provider and domain name provider).

The whole point of a distributed cryptocurrency is that you all keep a copy of the blockchain, so that there is not a single point of failure.

This means that you could restore your seed nodes from the other nodes on the network. You'd just have to keep a note of some of the IP addresses of other nodes, so that you could reconnect your seed node to them when you reinstall your seed node after a disaster. Or better, you should encourage lots of people you trust to control their own nodes, who are willing to be listed as a seed node. Now you have resilience and don't need to keep your own written notes of IP addresses.

If you wanted to keep a copy of the blockchain on a machine that you want to control, just install a node on that machine, and it will constantly effectively back up the blockchain as it syncs with other nodes constantly during the day.