Dump all documents of Elasticsearch

Question

Is there any way to create a dump file that contains all the data of an index among with its settings and mappings?

A Similar way as mongoDB does with mongodump

Answer 1

The data itself is one or more lucene indices, since you can have multiple shards. What you also need to backup is the cluster state, which contains all sorts of information regarding the cluster, the available indices, their mappings, the shards they are composed of etc.

It's all within the data directory though, you can just copy it. Its structure is pretty intuitive. Right before copying it's better to disable automatic flush (in order to backup a consistent view of the index and avoiding writes on it while copying files), issue a manual flush, disable allocation as well. Remember to copy the directory from all nodes.

Also, next major version of elasticsearch is going to provide a new snapshot/restore api that will allow you to perform incremental snapshots and restore them too via api. Here is the related github issue: https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/issues/3826.