# Decreasing shards

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [April 4, 2018, 6:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800 "2018-04-04T18:27:48Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![s\_yash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/54ee81/32.png) [@s\_yash](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/s_yash)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2018, 6:27pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800/1 "2018-04-04T18:27:49Z")

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Currently all our indices are created daily with number of shards is 5(default). I would like to change number of shards to 1 for newly created indices. Can an index co exist with different number of shards.

example: logstash-\*

logstash-2018-03-\* with 5 shards  
logstash-2018-04-\* with 1 shard.

With the above configuration would I still be able search old and new data.

Thanks

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**Author:** ![Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/christian_dahlqvist/32/4617_2.png) [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2018, 6:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800/2 "2018-04-04T18:46:32Z")

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The beauty of using time-based indices is that you can change the underlying shard count over time through index templates, so the fact that indices being queried have different number of shards is not a problem at all.

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**Author:** ![s\_yash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/54ee81/32.png) [@s\_yash](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/s_yash)\
**Post date:** [April 4, 2018, 7:36pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800/3 "2018-04-04T19:36:45Z")

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Thank you Christian\_Dahlquist for your quick response.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [May 2, 2018, 7:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/decreasing-shards/126800/4 "2018-05-02T19:37:03Z")

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