Hi Victor! Thanks for bringing up this discussion 😊
I completely agree that a first citizen backup and restore mechanism in Cassandra would be great. I’d like to explore a little bit more the solution involving Sidecar. While it is true that it would “force” you to have yet another component running, it definitely comes with a lot of benefits besides the current other features it provides (control plane, analytics library, CDC over Kafka, to name some). * It allows for a more modular approach to a Cassandra deployment. In my humble opinion, having smaller, more specialized processes is the direction we should be following, as opposed to keep making the core of the project bigger and more complex. * It allows for a faster iteration in terms of software. When it comes to version upgrades, it is definitely way easier to update just the sidecar than the entire Cassandra core. It is also less risky. * Blast radius is also smaller. It is better to have the Sidecar affected if a backup process stalls/breaks/misbehaves than the whole Cassandra core. That’s my two cents! Bernardo From: Victor Araujo <[email protected]> Date: Monday, 5 October 2026 at 13:34 To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [DISCUSS] Backup and restore in Cassandra Hi everyone, I would like to discuss the possibility of having a built-in backup and restore mechanism in Cassandra, including incremental backups and support for external object storage such as S3. The main goal would be to provide a supported solution while keeping the implementation provider-agnostic and avoiding unnecessary operational overhead. I initially discussed this on Slack and was pointed to CEP-36 and the previous discussions around external storage and snapshots. We also discussed whether S3 would be too provider-specific, and whether Cassandra Sidecar could be part of the solution. My concern with Sidecar is that introducing another component would increase the operational footprint, which goes against one of the goals of this work. I also have a small PoC on top of trunk exploring some of these ideas. I'd be interested in hearing other opinions and any previous work I should look at. If there is interest in pursuing this, would a draft CEP be a useful next step so we can start working on the design in parallel? Link of the first slack discussion about this topic: https://the-asf.slack.com/archives/CK23JSY2K/p1789021792614639 Thanks, Victor Cavichioli
