Backing up Solr indexes

Steps to back up Solr indexes when backups are intended to restore a cluster with the same token layout, and can be backed up in a rolling fashion.

Use these steps as a practical starting point to create backups for Solr indexes. These steps apply when the backups are intended to restore a cluster with the same token layout, and the backups can be created in a rolling fashion.

Procedure

For each node:

  1. Drain the node to ensure that the Solr cores are in sync with their backing Cassandra tables. This command forces a memtable flush that forces a Solr hard commit:
    nodetool drain
  2. Shut down the node.
  3. Manually back up your data directories. The default location for Solr index files is /var/lib/cassandra/data/solr.data.
  4. Restart the node.