Elasticsearch has consistency requirements that span the entire cluster. The only reliable method for creating snapshots of an Elastic environment is to create snapshots from within Elastic. Elastic documentation states “You cannot back up an Elasticsearch cluster by making copies of the data directories of its nodes. There are no supported methods to restore any data from a filesystem-level backup.”1 If snapshots created outside of Elastic are used to restore a cluster, the system may report corruption, missing files, other inconsistencies, or may have restored the system with missing data. Elastic Stack snapshots are automatically deduplicated so storage overhead is minimized. See the following references for more information about snapshot and restore capabilities in Elasticsearch:
Elasticsearch Guide 8.2, Snapshot and restore, May 2022, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/snapshot-restore.html
