Backuping your bots works!
I have local teleporters that save and load bots to/from local folder.
I originally had a system of Duplo/Alga shellular that was evolving for a long time, several months. I had >1200 bots backed up during that time. Then Eric introduced SeaSnake. The snake itself could not make it in my sim, but Alga minimalis infected with Snake genome could. They came in and wiped out my previous sim completely. For the last month I only had these Alga minimalis in my sim. I also changed conditions a lot by adding shapes, modifying energy flow and tweaking costs.
Just an hour ago the local teleporter brought in a Duplo that was saved over three months ago and that Duplo is doing so great, it multiplied to >600 bots. This is fun! Let's see what happens now.