Elasticsearch will potentially be corrupt when you run simple filesystem backups. You have no idea what is committed to disk vs what is still contained in memory. From experience I can tell you that a certain percentage of your backups will be corrupt and a restore will have usually a partial data loss or even a total since ES may simply refuse to start up and manually fixing the on-disk stuff is not practicable. Mongo file system snapshots at least used to be an acceptable backup mechanism (still seems to be the case None )