Frozen tier: (Windows only) The frozen data tier relies on multiple caching mechanisms to speed up access to searchable snapshot files. One of these caches uses sparse files to avoid creating large files on disk when it is not strictly required. A bug prevented files from being created with the right options to enable sparse support on Windows, leading Elasticsearch to create potentially large files that can end up consuming all the disk space.

This issue is fixed in Elasticsearch versions 7.15.2 and later. There is no known workaround for earlier versions. Filesystems that enable sparse files by default are not affected. For more details, see #79371.

Snapshot and restore: If an index is deleted while the cluster is concurrently taking more than one snapshot then there is a risk that one of the snapshots may never complete and also that some shard data may be lost from the repository, causing future restore operations to fail. To mitigate this problem, set snapshot.max_concurrent_operations: 1 to prevent concurrent snapshot operations:

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "persistent" : {
    "snapshot.max_concurrent_operations" : 1
  }
}

This issue is fixed in Elasticsearch versions 7.13.1 and later. It is not possible to repair a repository once it is affected by this issue, so you must restore the repository from a backup, or clear the repository by executing DELETE _snapshot/<repository name>/*, or move to a fresh repository. For more details, see #73456.