We have three node cluster for Cassandra/Elassandra and I needs to setup backup for this. I used "nodetool snapshot" command for taking backup, but as we are using elasticserach so do I need to take separate backups of Indices or taking backup from "nodetool snapshot" is enough for this.
if separate backup is required for indices then can you pls suggest me how to take backup/restore because there is no proper documentation for taking elassendra backup/restore
Thanks
Since
Elassandra = Elasticsearch + Cassandra, So you need backup from Cassandra on the same time of backup from Elasticsearch.
By design, Elassandra synchronously updates Elasticsearch indices on the Cassandra write path. Therefore, Elassandra can backup data by taking a snapshot of Cassandra SSTables and Elasticsearch Lucene files on the same time on each node, as follows :
For Cassandra SSTables use:
nodetool snapshot --tag <snapshot_name> <keyspace_name>
And for index files use copy them by:
cp -al $CASSANDRA_DATA/elasticsearch.data/<cluster_name>/nodes/0/indices/<index_name>/0/index/(_*|segment*) $CASSANDRA_DATA/elasticsearch.data/snapshots/<index_name>/<snapshot_name>/
However there is a documentation on Elassandra to Backup and Restore.
Related
Edited after reading nodetool tagged questions.
We take snapshots of our single node cassandra database daily. If I want to restore a snapshot either on that node, or on our staging server which is running a different instance of cassandra, my understanding is I have to:
nodetool disablegossip
nodetool disablebinary
nodetool drain
Copy the sstable files from the snapshot directories to the sstable directories under the keyspace directory.
Run nodetool refresh on each table.
Enable binary & gossip.
Is this sufficient to safely bring the snapshot sstable files in without cassandra overwriting them while I'm doing the refresh?
What is the opposite of nodetool drain?
Another edit: What about sstableloader? Should I use that instead? If so, how? I looked at the "documentation" and am none the wiser.
The steps you outlined isn't quite right. You don't shutdown Cassandra and you shouldn't just copy the files on top of the existing SSTables.
At a high level, the steps to restore table snapshots on a node are:
TRUNCATE the table you want to restore (will remove the SSTables from the data directories).
Copy the SSTables from data/ks_name/table-UUID/snapshots/snapshot_name subdirectory into the "live" data directory data/ks_name/table-UUID.
Run nodetool refresh -- ks_name table_name.
You will need to repeat these steps for each application table you want to restore. NOTE: Do NOT restore system tables, only application tables.
The detailed steps are documented in Restoring from a snapshot in Cassandra.
To restore a snapshot into another cluster, I prefer to refer to this as "cloning". The procedure for cloning snapshots to another cluster depends on whether the source and destination clusters have identical configuration.
If both source and destination clusters are identical, follow the steps I documented here -- https://community.datastax.com/questions/4534/. I've explained what identical configuration means in this post.
If they are not identical, follow the steps I documented here -- https://community.datastax.com/questions/4477/. Cheers!
I am working on a cassandra backup and recovery strategy for our cassandra system and am trying to understand how the backup and sstable recovery works in cassandra. Here are of my observations and related questions (my need is to setup a standby/backup cluster which would become active if the primary cluster goes down.. so I want to keep them in sync in terms of data, so I want to take periodic backups at my active cluster and recover to the standby cluster)
Took a snapshot backup. Dropped a table in cassandra. Stopped cassandra, recovered from the snapshot backup (copied the sstables to the data/ folder), started cassandra. Ran cqlsh on the node, and I still do not see the table created. Should this work? Am I missing any step ?
In the above scenario, I then tried to re-setup the schema (I take backup of the schema in the snapshot) using the cql commant source . This created the table for me. However it creates a "new version" of table for me. When I recover the snapshot has the older version (different uuid labelled folders for table). After recovery, I still see no data in the table. Possibly because I created a new table?
I was finally able to recover data after running nodetool repair and using sstableloader to restore table data from another node in the cluster.
My question is
a. what is the right way to setup a new (blank- no schema) cluster from a snapshot? How do you setup the schema and recover data?
b. how do you restore a cluster from a backup with table alterations. How do you bring a cluster running an older version of schema to a newer version of schema when recovering from a backup (snapshot or incremental)?
(NOTE: cassandra newbie here)
So if you want to restore a snapshot, you need to copy the snapshot files back to the sstable directory and then run: nodetool refresh. You can read:
https://docs.datastax.com/en/dse/5.1/dse-admin/datastax_enterprise/operations/opsBackupSnapshotRestore.html
for more information. Also, there are 3rd party tools that can back up your data and then restore it as it was at the time of the backup. We use a tool: Cohesity (formally Talena/Imanis). It has a lot of capabilities (refreshing A to B, restore/rename, etc.). There are other popular ones as well. All of them have costs associated with them.
Hopefully that helps?
-Jim
We have a regular backup of our cluster and we store schema and snapshot back up on aws s3 on daily basis.
Somehow we have lost all the data and while recovering the data from backup we are able to recover schema but while copying snapshots files to /var/lib/cassandra/data directory its not showing up the data in the tables.
After copying the data we have done nodetool refresh -- keyspace table but still nothing is working out.
could you please help on this ?
Im new at Apache Cassandra, but my first focus at this topic was the Backup.
If you want to restore from a Snapshot (on new node/cluster) you have to shut down Cassandra on any node and clear any existing data from these folders:
/var/lib/cassandra/data -> If you want to safe your System Keyspaces so delete only your Userkeyspaces folders
/var/lib/cassandra/commitlog
/var/lib/cassandra/hints
/var/lib/cassandra/saved_cashes
After this, you have to start Cassandra again (the whole Cluster). Create the Keyspace like the one you want to restore and the table you want to restore. In Your Snapshot folder you will find a schema.cql script for the creation of the table.
After Creating the Keyspaces an tables again, wait a moment (time depends on the ammount of nodes in your cluster and keypsaces you want to restore.)
Shut down the Cassandra Cluster again.
Copy the Files from the Snapshot folder to the new folders of the tables you want to restore. Do this on ALL NODES!
After copying the files, start the nodes one by one.
If all nodes are running, run the nodetool repair command.
If you try to check the data via CQLSH, so think of the CONSISTENCY LEVEL! (ALL/QUORUM)
Thats the way, wich work at my Cassandra cluster verry well.
The general steps to follow for restoring a snapshot is:
1.Shutdown Cassandra if still running.
2.Clear any existing data in commitlogs, data and saved caches directories
3.Copy snapshots to relevant data directories
4.Copy incremental backups to data directory (if incremental backups are enabled)
If required, set restore_point_in_time parameter in commitlog_archiving.properties to
restore point.
5.Start Cassandra.
6.Run repair
So try running repair after copying data.
We have a 10 node Cassandra cluster. We configured a repair in Opscenter. We find there is a backups folder created for every table in Opscenter keyspace. It keeps growing huge. Is there a solution to this, or do we manually delete the data in each backups folder?
First off, Backups are different from snapshots - you can take a look at the backup documentation for OpsCenter to learn more.
Incremental backups:
From the datastax docs -
When incremental backups are enabled (disabled by default), Cassandra
hard-links each flushed SSTable to a backups directory under the
keyspace data directory. This allows storing backups offsite without
transferring entire snapshots. Also, incremental backups combine with
snapshots to provide a dependable, up-to-date backup mechanism.
...
As with snapshots, Cassandra does not automatically clear
incremental backup files. DataStax recommends setting up a process to
clear incremental backup hard-links each time a new snapshot is
created.
You must have turned on incremental backups by setting incremental_backups to true in cassandra yaml.
If you are interested in a backup strategy, I recommend you use the OpsCenter Backup Service instead. That way, you're able to control granularly which keyspace you want to back up and push your files to S3.
Snapshots
Snapshots are hardlinks to old (no longer used) SSTables. Snapshots protect you from yourself. For example you accidentally truncate the wrong keyspace, you'll still have a snapshot for that table that you can bring back. There are some cases when you have too many snapshots, there's a couple of things you can do:
Don't run Sync repairs
This is related to repairs because synchronous repairs generate a Snapshot each time they run. In order to avoid this, you should run parallel repairs instead (-par flag or by setting the number of repairs in the opscenter config file note below)
Clear your snapshots
If you have too many snapshots and need to free up space (maybe once you have backed them up to S3 or glacier or something) go ahead and use nodetool clearsnapshots to delete them. This will free up space. You can also go in and remove them manually from your file system but nodetool clearsnapshots removes the risk of rm -rf ing the wrong thing.
Note: You may also be running repairs too fast if you don't have a ton of data (check my response to this other SO question for an explanation and the repair service config levers).
I am trying to backup the whole cluster consistently. What are different ways to backup and restore Cassandra cluster?
If you are using the DataStax Enterprise version, then the easiest way is to perform the backups and restore using OpsCenter.
If you are using the DataStax Community or open-sourced version of Cassandra, then use nodetool snapshot to create backups of tables and/or keyspaces.
Please bear in mind that SSTables are immutable, i.e. they never change once they are written to disk. So unlike RDBMS data files, SSTables are not updated.
To perform a snapshot cluster-wide, use SSH tools such as pssh to perform parallel snapshots on all nodes.
More information on the snapshot utility is available here.
There are several ways to restore from snapshots. One way is to re-load the data using the sstableloader tool where the data is read back into the cluster. Another way is by copying the SSTable directory from snapshot and running nodetool refresh. Finally, you can replace the existing data with the snapshot and restarting the node.
More information on backups and restores are available here.