A good piece of software is a one that can manage exceptional situations such as hardware failure or human error. Even though a cluster of a few servers is less dependent on 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 such 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 stopping indexation, flushing the data to disk, shutting down the cluster, and, finally, copying the data to a backup device.
Fortunately, now we can take snapshots and this section will guide you and show how this functionality works.