Elasticsearch – Can I delete a data-stream backing index

I've discovered after much suffering that the best way to run elasticsearch on a single server is to change the default setting of:

index.number_of_replicas: 1

to

index.number_of_replicas: 0

If there are 0 replicas, elasticsearch will never try to assign shards to any other "replica" then itself, thereby removing the issue of unassigned shards and corrupted indices.

My full (stable) standalone, non-default elasticsearch config is:

node.max_local_storage_nodes: 1
index.number_of_replicas: 0

Note, this is a config for a log-reader setup only, not a full scale production setup.

Well unfortunately it seems merging isn't possible.

An answer for the question that I also posted on the ES forum when I didn't get any responses here:

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/restore-from-backup-and-merge-with-newer-data/28760

Snapshot is a point in time copy of the data. When you restore you restore things to that point in time.

There is currently no way to merge like this.

A suggestion was to restore to a different index name and then use an alias which points to both indices for search, which could be a goer but I would think that would led to duplicate data being returned for searches.

Maybe the solution is to have 2 nodes with a copy of the data in each, although with a large data store that obviously could take up a lot more space.