cassandra.yaml: incremental_backups

[tolysz]

I was wondering if it would be possible to add:

CASSANDRA_INCREMENTAL_BACKUPS

environment variable which would control incremental_backups from cassandra.yaml?

[verma7]

Have you thought this through about how the incremental backups will work end to end? Will it create periodic incremental snapshots?

@vargup Do you think just changing that yaml parameter is enough for enabling incremental backups?

[varungup90]

AFAIK, only yaml change is not sufficient for incremental backup. At Cassandra, taking snapshot or backup is just copying SSTables to a different folder location at same machine. Where as framework, is designed to upload those snapshots to S3 or Azure. For incremental backup, load of code churning is required, as it need to support restore as well.

[tolysz]

If you set this env to True, it will allow you to use incremental backups.
The procedure will be: nodetool snapshot and it creates both a snapshot and the incremental backup.
One would need to do something with the backup folders as they will start grow.
Without this setting, there is no way of to trigger incremental backups. The default - false is a good start, but at some point one would want to add more safety and it would not be possible without this change.

[tolysz]

Just a note to myself.

nodetool enablebackup

Will make cassandra to start the incremental backups. It is enough for me...

[varungup90]

Those backups will be created locally on that host, and if that satisfies you requirement, then great.