One embodiment of the present invention provides a switch. The switch includes a multicast management module, a storage module, and a recovery module. During operation, the multicast management module represents multicast information from one or more entries of a multicast data structure in a way that the switch can derive its multicast states from the multicast information. The storage module stores the multicast information in a recovery file in a local persistent storage device. If the switch reboots, the recovery module restores the multicast states of the switch from the multicast information in the recovery file.