I recently had to do some shuffling with one of my cassandra nodes because it was running out of disk space. I did a few things in the process, and I'm not sure in the end which caused my problem. First I added a second file path to the data directory in cassandra.yaml. Things still worked fine after this, as far as I could tell. Shortly after this, however, I took down the node and rsync'd the data from both data directories, as well as commitlogs, to an external drive. I then shut down the machine, replaced the hard drives with bigger drives, and re-installed the OS. I re-created the data directories, rsync'd the data and commitlogs back over from the external drive, and started up cassandra, re-adding it to the ring. When it came up, all of my rows were missing for one columnfamily and nearly all my rows were missing for another--or at least that's what it looks like, based on walking the rows. I tried scrubbing each of the nodes. One of them had insufficient disk space (yes, this seems to be a recurring problem) for scrub, so I did upgradesstables instead, and that one is still in progress. So far the scrub/upgradesstables hasn't seemed to help. But in the log messages created during scrub/upgradesstables it shows realistic numbers (i.e., in terms of the rows that existed before this ordeal) created in each new sstable. Also, the loads shown when I run nodetool ring still reflects the numbers with the complete set of rows. That's encouraging, but I can't seem to access these phantom rows. Please help!
Thanks, Casey
