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Maintained by AxonOps — production-grade documentation from engineers who operate distributed databases at scale

Restore a single node from a remote backup

Follow this procedure to restore a single Cassandra node from a total loss of all data where the replacement node has the same IP address as the original.

NOTE: Restoring a node from a total loss can only be performed from a remote backup.

Ensure Cassandra is stopped on the new node and that its data directories are all empty. 

sudo systemctl stop cassandra
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/cassandra/commitlog/* /var/lib/cassandra/data/* /var/lib/cassandra/hints/* /var/lib/cassandra/saved_caches/*

Allow the AxonOps user to write to the Cassandra data directory. 

sudo chmod -R g+w /var/lib/cassandra/data

These commands assume you are storing the Cassandra data in the default location /var/lib/cassandra/. Update the paths if your data is stored elsewhere.

Start the AxonOps agent if it is not already running. 

sudo systemctl start axon-agent

Now open the Restore page in the AxonOps Dashboard by going to Operations > Restore.

restore

Choose the backup you wish to restore from the list and click the RESTORE button.

This will show the details of the backup and allow you to restore to all nodes or a subset using the checkboxes in the Nodes list.

restore

Ensure only the node you wish to restore is selected in the checkbox list and start the restore by clicking the REMOTE RESTORE button.

The restore progress will be displayed in the Backup Restorations in Progress list.

restore

After the restore has completed successfully, fix the ownership and permissions on the Cassandra data directories. 

sudo chown -R cassandra.cassandra /var/lib/cassandra/data
sudo chmod -R g-w /var/lib/cassandra/data

Start Cassandra on the restored node. 

sudo systemctl start cassandra