On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Yang <teddyyyy...@gmail.com> wrote: > some of my colleagues seem to use this method to backup/restore a cluster, > successfully: > >> on each of the node, save entire /cassandra/data/ dir to S3, > then on a new set of nodes, with exactly the same number of nodes, copy > back each of the data/ dir. > > then boot up cluster.
Yep, that works as long as the two clusters have the same tokens and replication strategies. > but I wonder how it worked: doesn't the system keyspace store information > specific to the current cluster, such as my sibling nodes in the cluster, my > IP ?? all these would change once you copy the "frozen" data files onto a > new set of nodes. Yes, for this reason you should not restore the system keyspace files (except, optionally, "Schema".). Definitely you should not restore LocationInfo. LocationInfo contains ip-to-token mappings. Also you should make your target cluster have a unique cluster name, and the old cluster name is also stored in LocationInfo... =Rob -- =Robert Coli AIM>ALK - rc...@palominodb.com YAHOO - rcoli.palominob SKYPE - rcoli_palominodb