Discussion with Datos.io on how to backup and restore Apache Cassandra.

1. SOUTH BAY CASSANDRA USERS MARCH 2016
BACKUP AND RESTORE FOR
APACHE CASSANDRA
Aaron Morton
@aaronmorton
CEO
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand License

2. AboutThe Last Pickle.
Work with clients to deliver and improve Apache Cassandra
based solutions.
Apache Cassandra Committer and DataStax MVPs.
Based in New Zealand,Australia, France & USA.

3. Why Backup
Commit Log Archiving
Table Snap

4. Why Backup?
Replication is for Availability.

5. Why Backup?
Replicate good data as fast as
bad data.

6. Three ReasonsTo Backup…
Business Continuity Planning /
Disaster Recovery Planning
(AKA Data Centre is on fire.)

7. Three ReasonsTo Backup…
Environment Cloning
(AKA Let’s make a new Data Centre.)

8. Three ReasonsTo Backup…
Point In Time Recovery
(AKA Bad deploy.)

9. Why Backup
Commit Log Archiving
Table Snap

10. Commit Log
Writes are first written to the
Commit Log (on each node).

11. Commit Log
Commit Log can grow up to
8GB in size.

12. Commit Log
Commit Log is made up of 32
MB Segments.

13. Commit Log
Commit Log contains
Mutations, which have row
fragments.

14. Commit Log
Mutations are serialised in the
form they are sent over the
wire.

15. Commit Log Archiving
Archive Segment when full.
Restore Segments at startup
(if specified).

16. commitlog_archiving.properties
archive_command=
Run this command when a Segment
is full.

17. commitlog_archiving.properties
restore_directories=
Read all files in this CSV list of
directories at startup and run
restore_command for each.

18. commitlog_archiving.properties
restore_point_in_time=
Stop processing mutations with a
timestamp higher than this.

19. commitlog_archiving.properties
precision=MICROSECONDS
Precision used for timestamps.

20. Cassandra Parameter
-Dcassandra.replayList=
CSV white list of keyspace.table to
replay.

21. Why Backup
Commit Log Archiving
Table Snap

22. Table Snap

23. Table Snap
Continually Backup and
Restore SSTables to S3.

24. tablesnap
Watch for files closed or
moved into the data
directories.

25. tablesnap
Upload all SSTable
components, splitting large
files, using multiple threads.

26. tablesnap
Includes a list of SSTables in
the directory.

27. tablesnap
Skips file if it was removed by
compaction during processing.

28. tablechop
Deletes old files from the
backup set to implement a
rolling window.

29. tablechop
Specify how many days to
keep.

30. tablechop
Use - -debug to reduce the
stress.
(AKA Dry Run, does not delete the files.)

31. tableslurp
Slurp SSTables from S3 to a
local directory for restoring.

32. tableslurp
Restores the latest backup set,
or a named backup set.

33. Table Snap Pros
Simple.

34. Table Snap Cons
No monitoring.
Manual restore into cluster.
No support for topology
change.

35. Thanks.

36. Aaron Morton
@aaronmorton
Co-Founder & Principal Consultant
www.thelastpickle.com