with the patch http://review.gluster.com/551 going in, by not storing 'rebalance' state, we are not going to loose anything other than the ability to start rebalance/decommissioning automatically once the glusterd comes back.

But considering user always has an option here to 'start' the process again. Only thing is 'status' of previous rebalance process will be lost. Which I guess is more of the cosmetic improvement, and considering the possible races/corner cases involved with preserving the 'state' of rebalance, I would consider not having the persistent state for rebalance would be a cleaner bet.

CHANGE: http://review.gluster.com/2540 (cluster/dht: Rebalance will be a new
glusterfs process) merged in master by Vijay Bellur (vijay)

The above patch (mainline) saves Rebalance state to help in restarting of rebalance when glusterd starts up.

Checked on the release-3.3 branch, by killing all gluster processes when rebalance was running. Restarting glusterd led to rebalance also being resumed, hence showing the state was saved.