Well, that sucks. Be interested if you could find out if any of the streamed SSTables are retaining their levels. To answer your questions: 1) No. However, you could set your nodes to join in write_survey mode, which will stop them from joining the ring and you can initiate the join over JMX when you are ready (once compactions catch up). 2) A 1TB compaction might be completely plausible if you are using compression and lots of SSTables are being streamed into L0 and triggering STCS compactions, or being compacted with L1.
