# Deleting/Recreating specific replica?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [May 7, 2016, 12:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459 "2016-05-07T12:24:55Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ronchalant](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ronchalant)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2016, 12:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459/1 "2016-05-07T12:24:55Z")
We have a 1.7.1 cluster that I just setup a new repo on for snapshots, so I had to restart the cluster.
Was a graceful restart. Cluster hadn't been restarted in quite a while (months).
When it came up we had a number of unassigned replicas. I manually rerouted these, but now I have a number of replica shards that are stuck on initializing.
Some of these are pretty big (15-30gb) due to some poor choices on num of shards (we'll be correcting that after we move to 2.3.2).
Is there a way to specifically delete and recreate a specific replica? Or do I have to set the number of replicas to 0 then back up to 1 to recreate _all_ replicas?
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2016, 8:10pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459/2 "2016-05-07T20:10:41Z")
> [@ronchalant](#):
>
> Some of these are pretty big (15-30gb)
That's not that big really.[quote="ronchalant, post:1, topic:49459"]
Is there a way to specifically delete and recreate a specific replica? Or do I have to set the number of replicas to 0 then back up to 1 to recreate all replicas?
[/quote]
The latter.
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### Author:  [@ronchalant](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ronchalant)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2016, 11:31pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459/3 "2016-05-07T23:31:21Z")
yeah by big I meant I think shards of 15-30gb for a growing index is going on the large side? I recently created a new index that we're expecting to grow quickly - it'll start at around 2TB and will grow about 1TB/year. Not super huge by Elastic standards, but it has me looking much more closely at shard allocation than I had previously.
Regarding the issue here in the thread, I had to step away from this for a while and the shards did eventually initialize after a couple hours. It just didn't make much sense to me since these indexes in question _are_ relatively small overall.
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### Author:  [@warkolm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/warkolm)
#### Post date: [May 7, 2016, 11:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459/4 "2016-05-07T23:37:22Z")
It could have been cluster recovery tasks holding things up, 1.X didn't have as many optimisations as 2.X for recovery etc.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 5, 2017, 10:53pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-recreating-specific-replica/49459/5 "2017-07-05T22:53:10Z")