# Unassigned Primary and Replica Shard
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/unassigned-primary-and-replica-shard/23380
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [April 23, 2015, 7:12pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/unassigned-primary-and-replica-shard/23380 "2015-04-23T19:12:15Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ariel](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ariel)
#### Post date: [April 23, 2015, 7:12pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/unassigned-primary-and-replica-shard/23380/1 "2015-04-23T19:12:15Z")
Hello,
I have a 4 machine cluster (2 data nodes and 2 master nodes) and some time
last night I had a failover from one master to the other. At this time a
number of things happened:
1. Original master came back up but did not join the cluster
2. Shards for about 5 indexes are unassigned and now report that they
have 0 documents in this.
Case 2 is much more worrying as I'm loosing data. Does anyone have insight
of why this happens? How can it be avoided?
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 12:18am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/unassigned-primary-and-replica-shard/23380/2 "2017-07-06T00:18:01Z")