On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:53 AM, Jeffrey Wang <jw...@palantir.com> wrote:
> Hi all, > > > > When I drop a column family, it creates a snapshot. When does the snapshot > go away and free up the disk space? I was able to run nodetool clearsnapshot > to get rid of them, but will they go away themselves? (Also, is there a > purpose to keeping a snapshot around?) > No, they won't go away by themselves. Using nodetool clearsnapshot or manual deletion are the correct way to get rid of those. The purpose of the snapshot is to protect yourself against mistakes. Moreover, unless you are doing tests, it's almost always good practice to keep a backup of whatever you drop, just in case you realize later on that there was some data you needed to keep, so this also take care of that for you. And it's far easier for you to know what to do with the snapshot (whether that is deleting it or archiving it somewhere) than for the application. -- Sylvain
