Safemode is considered as the read-only mode of NameNode in a cluster. During the startup of NameNode, it is in SafeMode. It does not allow writing to file-system in Safemode. At this time, it collects data and statistics from all the DataNodes. Once it has all the data on blocks, it leaves Safemode.
The main reason for Safemode is to
avoid the situation when NameNode starts replicating data in DataNodes before collecting all the information from DataNodes. It may erroneously assume that a block is not replicated well enough, whereas, the issue is that NameNode does not know about whereabouts of all the replicas of a block. Therefore, in Safemode, NameNode first collects the information about how many replicas exist in cluster and then tries to create replicas wherever the number of replicas is less than the policy.
