My bitcoin Tor node recently suffered a hard disk failure. After changing the hardware, re-installing Linux and bitcoind, setting up Tor for a hidden service, I realized (obviously !) that my external onion address had to change. So my question is: what do I need to do to ensure I keep the same onion address the next time my node suffers unrecoverable failure? Looking at the directory /var/lib/tor/bitcoin_service, I can see two files hostname and private_key where the former does contain my onion address (which I think is related to my private key). So I am guessing all I need to do is back up these files and restore them in my new system (while setting up /etc/tor/torrc and bitcoin.conf appropriately of course, as explained here). Do I need more?
EDIT: it seems that simply importing the files hostname and private_key into a new system (having properly defined /etc/tor/torrc and bitcoin.conf) does not work (the node fails to connect to Tor network). So Tor probably maintains additional state apart from these two files. So the question remains open: how to set up a new system so as to keep existing onion address.
