Is it safe to run sstableverify against live sstables?

Question

Is it safe to run sstableverify against live sstables while Cassandra is running? After and while running sstableverify in a lab, I cannot find anything in any logs that would indicate a problem.

Answer 1

Safe maybe... But, you may run into the disappearance of sstables, due to compaction (something else mabye), while running sstableverify. Use nodetool verify instead for live data. Use sstableverify for data on offline recovery systems to verify data.

Answer 2

SSTables are immutable by nature, so you can work with them using the same user that runs Cassandra (see comment for explanation). If you want to prevent their disappearance because of compaction, you may take the snapshot that will create hard links to files (but don't forget to remove snapshot later).