Can a nodes state get corrupted such that it cannot come back online? Is there a recovery tool?
State is only stored on disk if it must be recoverable. For durable queues / exchanges / bindings, we use mnesia. If mnesia is unable to start and read in the tables recording this information then RabbitMQ cannot start or recover those queues / exchanges / bindings. RabbitMQ itself manages the storage on disk of messages. The recovery routines for these are robust and do their best to recover as much as possible. If corruption occurs, RabbitMQ will recover what it can, and continue to start up normally.