Book Image

Cassandra High Availability

By : Robbie Strickland
Book Image

Cassandra High Availability

By: Robbie Strickland

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Cassandra High Availability
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Backing up data


While Cassandra itself goes a long way toward reducing the possibility of data loss, it cannot prevent loss or corruption due to administrative or application-level mistakes. For this reason, it is still advisable to maintain backups of critical tables to allow you to recover to a known good point in the past.

Taking a snapshot

Fundamentally, backing up data in Cassandra involves taking a snapshot of the SSTable for a given keyspace at a moment in time, as it must have all the tables in order to properly recover if needed. You can create a snapshot using nodetool as follows:

nodetool snapshot [keyspace_name]

This will create hard links to the current SSTables in that keyspace's snapshots directory (located inside the data directory, which is located at /var/lib/cassandra/data/[keyspace_name] by default), under a directory name based on the Unix epoch at the time the snapshot is generated. The advantage of this approach is that the hard link does not require any additional disk...