Shallow snapshots

Shallow copy snapshots allow you to reference data from an entire remote-backed repository instead of storing all of the data from the segment in a snapshot repository. This makes accessing segment data faster than using normal snapshots because segment data is not stored in the snapshot repository.

Enabling shallow snapshots

Use the Snapshot API and set the remote_store_index_shallow_copy repository setting to true to enable shallow snapshot copies, as shown in the following example:

PUT /_snapshot/snap_repo
{
        "type": "s3",
        "settings": {
            "bucket": "test-bucket",
            "base_path": "daily-snaps",
            "remote_store_index_shallow_copy": true
        }
    }

Once enabled, all requests using the Snapshot API will remain the same for all snapshots. After the setting is enabled, we recommend not disabling the setting. Doing so could affect data durability.

Considerations

Consider the following before using shallow copy snapshots:

• Shallow copy snapshots only work for remote-backed indexes.
• All nodes in the cluster must use OpenSearch 2.10 or later to take advantage of shallow copy snapshots.
• The incremental file count and size between the current snapshot and the last snapshot is 0 when using shallow copy snapshots.
• Searchable snapshots are not supported inside shallow copy snapshots.