# When 2 of 3 masters die, how to restore the cluster?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/when-2-of-3-masters-die-how-to-restore-the-cluster/349324
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Tags:** docker
**Created:** [December 14, 2023, 6:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/when-2-of-3-masters-die-how-to-restore-the-cluster/349324 "2023-12-14T06:00:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@ycice](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/ycice)
#### Post date: [December 14, 2023, 6:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/when-2-of-3-masters-die-how-to-restore-the-cluster/349324/1 "2023-12-14T06:00:18Z")
Hi, i am using ES version 7.17.0
My cluster consists of
3 master-eligible
2 data + ingest
2 Coordinating
1 kibana
and they are running on AWS EC2 as docker container. 1 EC2 has 1 container
And i am testing availability and restoring method of ES
When 2 master-eligibles are down and if those 2 masters can't be restored forever or for some time(ex : network issue), then there is only 1 master and other nodes. And cluster will be down and not work
In this case, can i restore cluster?
I tried adding 3 more master eligible nodes but they can't join to the cluster since existing cluster is not discovered yet due to not satisfying QUORUM
Is there any way to exclude 2 down masters from cluster? Or any way to restore cluster?
---
### Author:  [@DavidTurner](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DavidTurner)
#### Post date: [December 14, 2023, 8:58am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/when-2-of-3-masters-die-how-to-restore-the-cluster/349324/2 "2023-12-14T08:58:24Z")
This is covered [in these docs](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/discovery-troubleshooting.html#discovery-no-master):
> Without the cluster metadata, the data in your cluster is meaningless. The cluster metadata is stored on a subset of the master-eligible nodes in the cluster. If a quorum can’t be discovered, the missing nodes were the ones holding the cluster metadata. [...] If you can’t start enough nodes to form a quorum, start a new cluster and restore data from a recent snapshot.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2024, 8:58am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/when-2-of-3-masters-die-how-to-restore-the-cluster/349324/3 "2024-01-11T08:58:29Z")
This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.