Working backwards from production to staging/dev

[ian douglas]

Hi everyone,

I was on the mailing list back in December/January, asking questions 
about rebalancing some nodes, etc. We currently have a ring of 3 
systems, redundancy set to 2, and all is well.

We'd like to snapshot our ring and build a new development/staging node 
from it (the old dev node is quite stale), and we're curious what the 
"best practice" is for something like that.

We're thinking we might replicate our 3 nodes as 3 more new nodes, but 
on a whole new ring, then remove one node, issue flush/cleanup commands 
on the remaining two (with redundancy set to '2', we should only need to 
remove one node, to have all data on both remaining nodes, right?), then 
tarball the Cassandra data path from one machine, and download it to a 
local development environment.

As long as we're using the same version of Cassandra, is there any 
drawback to this approach?

Thanks,
Ian