A good piece of software is one that manages an exceptional situation such as hardware failure or human error. Even though a cluster of a few servers is less exposed to hardware problems, bad things can still happen. For example, let's imagine that you need to restore your indices. One possible solution is to reindex all your data from a primary data store as a SQL database. But what will you do if it takes too long or, even worse, the only data store is Elasticsearch? Before Elasticsearch 1.0, creating backups of indices was not easy. The procedure included shutdown of the cluster before copying the data files. Fortunately, now we can take snapshots. Let's see how this works.