Thanks for the reply.
I'm not sure whether it would. Let me elaborate- I generate an index during our build process. I used to then archive this and distribute it to the various ES node data paths. I'd delete the older version of the index first by simply removing the directory, then I'd copy in the new index directory. It worked well. However, now , because I have multiple indices, I have no way of telling which is the index directory I should delete up front. Would snapshotting solve this issue ?