How to make nodes forget about the old/previous cluster?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
3

Thanks David. Here's what I did to now form a cluster between es3-5 nodes mentioned in OP.

service elasticsearch stop
rm -rf {path.data}/*
service elasticsearch start

I'd appreciate you confirming whether this is the ideal solution.

Also, thanks for insisting that elasticsearch-node should only be used as a last resort. Do I understand correctly that this is the preferred order to approach things:

  1. if you have snapshots, then delete data-paths and restore from snapshots
  2. if you do not have snapshots, only then risk using elasticsearch-node as there's no other, third option anyway

What I'm not clear on is, doesn't option 1. guarantee data loss between 'now' and 'time-of-last-snapshot', as also pointed out by Thomas in the same thread?

I initially, probably naively, hoped there'd be some way to surgically excise 'stale' nodes (in my case, es0,es1,es2 above) from {path.data}/nodes/0/_state/.