Your multi-agent research pipeline crashed after processing 12 of 28 documents.

Option A combines lossless persistence with selective restoration. Each agent should checkpoint structured records containing completed document identifiers, extracted findings, source provenance, unresolved work, verification status, and schema version. A coordinator-level manifest can record which stages completed and where their artifacts are stored. On recovery, the coordinator skips completed documents and injects only the state required by each restarted agent.

Anthropic’s effective context-engineering guidance recommends structured notes stored outside the active context window and reloaded when needed. This preserves critical dependencies and progress without replaying an entire execution history.

Option B fragments recovery ownership across agents and makes cross-agent consistency, versioning, and dependency validation difficult. Option C preserves extensive logs but wastes context on redundant tool calls, obsolete instructions, and intermediate messages. Option D is useful for relevance retrieval but semantic search can omit exact details and should not serve as the authoritative recovery record. Structured checkpoints and a validated manifest provide deterministic recovery, efficient context reconstruction, auditability, and precise provenance. Writes should be atomic so partially produced exports are never mistaken for completed work.

================