How can I restore Cassandra snapshots?

Added more details:

You can run the snapshot for your particular keyspace using:

$ nodetool snapshot <mykeyspace> -t <SnapshotDirectoryName>

This will create the snapshot files inside the snapshots directory in data.

When you delete your data, make sure you don't delete the snapshots folder or you will not be able to restore it (unless you are moving it to another location / machine.)

$ pwd
/var/lib/cassandra/data/mykeyspace/mytable
$ ls
mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-CompressionInfo.db mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-Statistics.db
mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-Data.db mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-Filter.db mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-Index.db
mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-Summary.db mykeyspace-mytable-jb-2-TOC.txt snapshots


$ rm *
rm: cannot remove `snapshots': Is a directory

Once you are ready to restore, copy back the snapshot data into the keyspace/table directory (one for each table):

$ pwd
/var/lib/cassandra/data/mykeyspace/mytable
$ sudo cp snapshots/<SnapshotDirectoryName>/* .

You mentioned:

and that puts the snapshot directories back under their respective 'snapshots' directories, and a refresh >should restore the data:

I think the issue is that you are restoring the Snapshot data into the snapshot directory. It should go right in the table directory. Everything else seems right, let me know.

The docs say to put them into a directory named data/keyspace/table_name-UUID, but there is no such directory.

You don't have this UUID directory because you are using cassandra 2.0 and this UUID thing started with cassandra 2.2