title: Cassandra: Can't one use snapshots to rapidly scale out a cluster?
body: <p>This details how to replicate data to a new cluster:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/operations/ops_snapshot_restore_new_cluster.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.datastax.com/en/cassandra/2.1/cassandra/operations/ops_snapshot_restore_new_cluster.html</a></p>
  
  <p>Can't a similar scheme be used to rapidly scale out a cluster with existing data? Say take a snapshot of all the nodes, copy them all to new nodes, set the tokens in the yaml, set the peers to point to the old instances, and then join them up?</p>
  
  <p>Won't they be treated like nodes that once were part of the cluster and were rejoined?</p>