In a multi-data center, high-availability deployment, it may seem like taking backups of your Cassandra nodes is unnecessary. After all, if a node crashes and doesn't come back, there are usually other nodes in the data center containing replicas of the data lost. If an entire data center is lost, a new data center can be deployed into the existing Cassandra cluster, with data streamed from another data center.
Even if a copy of the data directory of a node was to be taken and copied off site, those files are of limited use in a large-scale deployment. This is because a node will only store data for specific token ranges. With Vnodes, token ranges are numerous and non-contiguous, making the backed-up data only ...
