Snapshots provide backups of your Elasticsearch indices. You can use snapshots to recover from a failure when not enough availability zones are used to provide high availability or to recover from accidental deletion.

Before you beginedit

To enable snapshots for your Elasticsearch clusters and to work with them, you must have configured a repository. After you have configured a snapshot repository, a snapshot is taken every 30 minutes or at the interval that you specify.

Beginning with Elastic Stack version 7.6, use Kibana to manage your snapshots. In Kibana, you can set up additional repositories where the snapshots are stored, other than the one currently managed by Elastic Cloud Enterprise. You can view and delete snapshots, and configure a snapshot lifecycle management (SLM) policy to automate when snapshots are created and deleted. To learn more, check the Snapshot and Restore documentation.

To use the snapshot lifecycle management features available starting in Elastic Stack version 7.6 you must also be using Elastic Cloud Enterprise version 2.5 or higher. If you upgrade to Elastic Stack version 7.6 in an earlier ECE version, when you upgrade to ECE version 2.5, on the Snapshots page you will have an option to initiate the migration to SLM. As well, if you create a deployment using Stack version 7.6.0 and an ECE version prior to 2.5, when you upgrade your ECE version to 2.5 you also need to upgrade your deployment to the next minor release after 7.6.0.

From within the Elastic Cloud Enterprise you can view the list of snapshots and also restore a snapshot from a different deployment in the same region.

For deployments with Elastic Stack versions 7.5 and below, You can configure the ECE snapshot count to keep up to a maximum of the 100 most recent, successful snapshots. Once your cluster has reached the total snapshot count, ECE removes old snapshots as new ones are taken. These tasks are available from the Elastic Cloud Enterprise UI:

List available snapshotsedit

To list all available snapshots:

The list shows when the snapshot was completed, whether the snapshot succeeded or was only partially successful, along with the number of shards and indices in the snapshot.

Configure the snapshot retention periodedit

For Elastic Stack versions 7.6 and above, refer to the Snapshot and Restore documentation to learn about the snapshot management features.

For Elastic Stack versions 7.5 and below, from within Elastic Cloud Enterprise you can set the snapshot interval and count to have control over the retention period for your clusters. The calculation displayed is based on a projected estimate of the snapshot interval, expected snapshot count, and current cluster size. Changing any of these factors results in a different retention period.

Change the snapshot intervaledit

If you find the the default snapshot interval isn’t working for your environment, you can change it. It might make sense to use a 4 or 24 hour interval if the data in your index doesn’t change that often but you need more snapshot history.

When you change the interval, the interval timer begins after the next scheduled snapshot.

Change the snapshot countedit

You can get more control over your repository space by adjusting the number of snapshots that are stored for your cluster. The minimum number of snapshots must be at least 12, the maximum limit is 100.