It is occasionally necessary to debug the graph of events starting from a saved state. To do this, the consensus snapshot and PCES files are required. Some of the PCES files are already part of the saved state and all are available further up the directory structure. The consensus snapshot is also available in the saved state, but is not easily accessible. To get it, the entire state must be loaded into memory and ad-hoc code written to extract it.

To make the process easier, the consensus snapshot protobuf object could just be written to disk separately alongside other human-readable files in the state directory like the roster. It would be very small and enable very easy graph debugging starting at that point in consensus time.