# DANGLING\_INDEX\_IMPORTED: How to cleanup old deleted indices
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 5, 2019, 6:47am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526 "2019-04-05T06:47:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@christian\_ha](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/christian_ha)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2019, 6:47am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526/1 "2019-04-05T06:47:57Z")
Hello together,
right now we have a 7 Node Cluster with Version 6.3.0. One Node is only for kibana. Every other Node hast the following options in elasticsearch.yml:
```
node.master: True
node.data: True
node.ingest: True
```
These are my \_cluster/settings:
```
GET _cluster/settings
{
"persistent": {
"xpack": {
"monitoring": {
"collection": {
"enabled": "true"
}
}
}
},
"transient": {
"cluster": {
"routing": {
"allocation": {
"disk": {
"watermark": {
"low": "92%",
"flood_stage": "99%",
"high": "97%"
}
}
}
},
"info": {
"update": {
"interval": "1m"
}
}
},
"discovery": {
"zen": {
"minimum_master_nodes": "4"
}
}
}
}
```
Since a couple of weeks i have a red cluster cause a lot of shards do not have a valid shard copy.
```
GET /_cat/shards?v&h=index,shard,prirep,state,unassigned.reason&s=state
index shard prirep state unassigned.reason
.monitoring-logstash-6-2019.02.25 0 p UNASSIGNED DANGLING_INDEX_IMPORTED
.monitoring-logstash-6-2019.02.25 0 r UNASSIGNED DANGLING_INDEX_IMPORTED
.monitoring-es-6-2019.02.21 0 p UNASSIGNED DANGLING_INDEX_IMPORTED
.monitoring-es-6-2019.02.21 0 r UNASSIGNED DANGLING_INDEX_IMPORTED
```
There are many more. All of them have been deleted weeks ago from curator. First i tried to delete these indices with:
```
DELETE .monitoring-logstash-6-2019.02.25,.monitoring-logstash-6-2019.02.25,.monitoring-es-6-2019.02.21,.monitoring-es-6-2019.02.21
```
But this seems to be an endless story. Do anyone know how to find the root cause and fix it?
Regards,
Christian
---
### Author:  [@ywelsch](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ywelsch)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2019, 6:56am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526/2 "2019-04-05T06:56:25Z")
Did you perhaps repurpose the node that was used for Kibana, i.e. was it master- or data-eligible at some point? If so, you've hit [https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/27073](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/27073). If the Kibana node previously contained metadata/data, this can cause this situation. The solution is to clean the data folder on the coordinating-only node.
In 7.0, we refuse to start a coordinating-only node that has local shard data.
---
### Author:  [@christian\_ha](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/christian_ha)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2019, 7:21am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526/3 "2019-04-05T07:21:43Z")
Hey Yannick,
i am not sure but it could be possible that there was a misconfiguration some weeks ago. I did have the following folder in our datafolder:
```
nodes/0/indices
```
I did the folowing steps:
1. Shut down elasticsearch
2. Delete the whole folder nodes
3. Start elasticseach
The subfolder **indices** was not created anymore.
After deleting the indexes of every 48 unasigned shard the cluster state is going back to green.
Thanks for your help.
Regards
Christian
---
### Author:  [@ywelsch](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ywelsch)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2019, 7:36am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526/4 "2019-04-05T07:36:56Z")
great, happy to hear that.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2019, 7:36am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/dangling-index-imported-how-to-cleanup-old-deleted-indices/175526/5 "2019-05-03T07:36:57Z")
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