Datastax Cassandra Community EC2 backup methods

Question

I am currently running a cluster (3 nodes) on AWS using the Datastax Cassandra Community AMI. The AMI does not give you the option to use EBS storage and I read that for Cassandra, instance-stored storage is better than EBS anyway.

My question is then, how can I take daily backups of this cluster and store them on S3 so that if something goes wrong I can restore the cluster?

Note: I did find this https://github.com/Netflix/Priam but there is no documentation on how to use it?

Answer 1

The instance store vs ebs debate was mostly made before PIOPS and GP2. In the day of GP2, ebs is probably fine.

Tablesnap ( https://github.com/JeremyGrosser/tablesnap ) is a commonly used tool to watch cassandra data directories and upload to s3. It "just works"