Managing backups and restoring from backups

Using OpsCenter, you can take, schedule, and manage backups across all registered DSE clusters.

A backup is a snapshot of all on-disk data files (SSTable files) stored in the data directory. Backups are taken per keyspace and while the system is online. A backup first flushes all in-memory writes to disk, then makes a hard link of the SSTable files for each keyspace. Backups are stored in the snapshots directory of the column family that's being snapshotted. For example, /var/lib/cassandra/data/OpsCenter/settings/snapshots.

You must have enough free disk space on the node to accommodate making snapshots of your data files. A single snapshot requires little disk space. However, snapshots will cause your disk usage to grow more quickly over time because a snapshot prevents old obsolete data files from being deleted. OpsCenter Data Backups allows you to specify a schedule to remove old backups and prevent backups from being taken when disk space falls below a specified level.

Note: OpsCenter Data Backups does not show or manage manual snapshots taken using the nodetool snapshot command.