We know how to move data around and manage Cassandra instances to handle the production situations. Cassandra provides simple one-liner commands to perform various complicated maintenance tasks to make life easy. Scaling out, scaling in, removing live or dead nodes, and load balancing are pleasantly simple and can be automated based on your configuration using scripts. Backups fall in the same category, but restoration can be a bit tricky. With the Cassandra data model, built-in replication, and support for multiple data center setups, one can configure Cassandra such that it may never need to be backed up. Also, for really large databases, it may be impractical to siphon out data instead of using replication. It may make sense to back up in a case where the database is not very large and one uses a replication factor of 1. In such a case, even a single malfunctioning server can cause loss of data. However, RF=1 is a bad idea in production setup and backup can just restore the data...