Per (elastic/elasticsearch#134769)
There are bunch of old indices lying around I’d like clear out - for example .reporting-2023-07-23 and .kibana_7.15.1_001. Having looked at the aliases I’m pretty sure these are unused, but of course it’s hard to be certain. Being a responsible admin I’d therefore like to snapshot them before deleting them, but the only way to snapshot/restore these indices is via the featureset, which is all or nothing. So if in two days time I decide I want them back, I have to roll everything “kibana” back to a backup of two days ago.
There must be a better way. How do other people backup legacy system indices before deleting them?
I ended up just using elasticdump and copying the raw records out as JSON to a local filesystem - at least now I have a copy - but the restore process from this untested and guaranteed to be painful.