Best way to backup

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I have come to know two ways of backing up.

  1. creating a repo and do backup
  2. copy the data folder

Which one is better?

My understanding about method 1 is that I cannot find anyway to restore the backup indexes to another ES that is not on the cluster. Is this true?

I also notice that method 2 sometimes will corrupt the indexes

My usage scenario is to copy some indexes from the server to a Laptop so that I work on it at home.

2

I use snapshot and restore to move data between clusters all the time, so it is certainly possible. I tend to backup into S3 as it is easily available, but you can also use a shared file system or even HDFS.