Will a snapshot erase all the messages and data I've posted onto the tangle? I reference the Hello World example https://learn.iota.org/tutorial/payments-and-messaging-leaderboard where users can embed messages into their transactions, via signatureMessageFragment of the transaction object. After a snapshot, will the messages be erased? If yes, does this also include tags?
3 Answers
Snapshots generally net off all transactions and only store the final account balances, not any meta data.
For example, see https://github.com/domschiener/snapshot/blob/master/snapshot.csv
Yes, all tags, messages, ... will be deleted. Only balances will be stored by all full nodes.
But not all nodes have to do snapshots:
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There's no incentives for a node to ignore snapshotting. The developers should mention in their Hello World example that the data gets erased every snapshot. Dec 15, 2017 at 7:44
Snapshots will delete all data, but full nodes can offer services to maintain the entire history of the tangle or subsets of the tangle in exchange for IOTA, for example.