Is it possible to do a point in time restore of cassandra on another cluster?

Question

If I have enabled commitlog archive on cluster A and backed up snapshots and commitlogs for the same at my backup server X. Can I restore this to a point in time on a cluster B using the backup I have on X? If yes, what caveats are there? Some documentation for the same would help. Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, you can restore backups of a cluster to another cluster. I like to call this operation "cloning".

There isn't any issue with cloning data to another cluster. The difference will be whether both the source and destination clusters have identical configuration or not. By "identical configuration", I mean:

• the cluster topologies are identical -- same number of DCs, same number of nodes in each DC
• the token assignments are identical -- the assigned tokens for each node in one cluster is a mirror-image of the nodes in another cluster

IMPORTANT - Do not clone system keyspaces/tables. You should only clone tables of your app's keyspaces.

If the clusters are identical, follow the steps I documented in this post -- https://community.datastax.com/questions/4534/ .

For non-identical clusters, follow the steps I documented in this post -- https://community.datastax.com/questions/4477/ . Note that you won't be able to clone the commitlogs if the destination cluster is not identical to the source cluster. Cheers!