# Documents still exist after index deletion

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/documents-still-exist-after-index-deletion/45352>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [March 24, 2016, 1:48pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/documents-still-exist-after-index-deletion/45352 "2016-03-24T13:48:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![iliasse](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/22d042/32.png) [@iliasse](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/iliasse)\
**Post date:** [March 24, 2016, 2:29pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/documents-still-exist-after-index-deletion/45352/3 "2016-03-24T14:29:16Z")

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Hi Everett,

Thank you for your answer. I deleted the 1 and 2 directories, renamed 2 to 0. And restarted my cluster. And it worked. Thank you for your time 🙂

> [@nik9000](#):
>
> Like if you do ps aux | grep elastic do you see just the one or multiple? Did you happen to run multiple Elasticsearch processes and then kill two of them?

What is weird is that on the third node (i'm running a three node setup) the actual current indices resides in directory 0 while directory 1 contains legacy indices. The second node is ok though (only 0 directory).  
So I'm wandering how could elastic even handle data and know which directories are the good ones across nodes.

I'm running elastic inside a Docker, One single instance per node. This problem happened after a hazardous shut down that i've mentioned here : [Elastic inside Docker loses docs when shutdown while bulk indexing](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-inside-docker-loses-docs-when-shutdown-while-bulk-indexing/45132)

Thank you for your time.

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