DayZ Persistence and Hive

Hive is the word DayZ uses for where characters and central data live. A public hive means your character is not married to one community server. A private hive means the admin owns that life. The server page on DayZ Manager shows the flag the crawler read: public or private. Players who lost a character to the wrong hive do not care what the hostname promised. Read the flag before you travel, and set the flag honestly before you advertise. The official and community split is related and not identical. Official servers are usually the public hive. A community can also run a public hive. A private hive is a choice about characters, not a badge of quality.

Persistence is the other folder: tents, barrels, stashes, bases, the things that make a map feel owned. It is stored with the mission and the profile, not in the player's head. If you move the dedicated server to a new machine and forget that directory, you have wiped without announcing a wipe. CFTools Architect hosts the process and the files. It does not decide that your storage directory is the one you think it is. Look at the path before the migration. Copy it. Boot. Confirm a known tent is still there. Then tell people.

A private hive plus persistence is the usual community package: your character, your base, their rules. It is also the package that makes a database mistake expensive. Back up on a schedule that survives the person who "knows where it is." A snapshot of the whole disk is acceptable if you know how to restore one folder from it. A snapshot you have never restored is a rumor. The wipe guide is the public half of this. The private half is the backup you do not post.

Time and restarts interact with persistence. A crash mid-write is how a base "vanishes" and comes back after a rollback, which is worse than a wipe because nobody agrees what the world is. Scheduled restarts, logged, are kinder. CFTools Cloud is where those restarts and the RCon session belong, so the restart is a button with a log and not an RDP window. If you are still kicking people by sitting on the host, you are one lockout away from a server you cannot manage. The restart note is the short version.

Mods that add storage add files the vanilla persistence path does not know. When you remove a base-building mod, you are not "cleaning types." You are orphaning objects. Say that in the changelog. The loot files and the mod list need to move together. A server page that still lists the mod while the folder is gone is a crawler delay, not a conspiracy. Restart, wait for the CFTools pass, and read your own server list entry.

Experimental and public branch hives are not interchangeable. Do not point a stable community at an experimental database "to test." The experimental guide is there so this sentence has a place to go. Characters are the one thing players will not forgive you for treating as a config experiment.

Copy the world before you move the process

Stop the server. Then copy. A live copy of persistence is a coin flip you will lose on the day the base matters. The hive, the mission storage, and the ban file are three different trees. CFTools Architect can host all of them and will not remind you which tree you forgot. Name the directories in a note that is not stored only on that machine. A second copy on a different disk is the backup. A snapshot you have never mounted is a rumor about a backup.

After a migration, join and walk to one object you placed yourself: a tent, a crate, a parked car if the mod has them. If it is there, the storage path survived. If the character is new and you promised it would not be, you booted an empty hive or a public one by mistake. Stop and fix the path before you announce the new IP on the server list. People will reconnect in a hurry and create fresh characters on the wrong database. Those fresh characters become the argument.

Public hive is a promise you must mean. A community that advertises "your official character comes with you" and then flips the flag after a bad weekend has stolen time, even if the cfg change was legal. Say the flag in the rules in the same words the server page uses. Private means this life stays here. Public means it does not. The official list is the public hive people already understand. A community server that is also public should expect tourists and dupes of gear from other public servers. If that is not your design, go private before the first stranger, not after.

Mods that add storage write files vanilla persistence does not know. Removing the mod orphans the objects. Leave the mod in place through one announced wipe, or tell people the objects will vanish. Do not remove it silently between restarts. The modded flag on your page will drop when the folder leaves -mod=. The tents will not tidy themselves. Wipe on purpose, restart, and look at the coast you cleared. Then let the scheduler resume. A persistence mistake repeated every six hours by an automatic restart is how a small typo becomes the whole map.