Q:

elasticsearch snapshot vs elasticdump

I have a very slow internet connection and have a server that is running Elasticsearch. I am looking at having a local, read only, version of the elastic search indices with a local kabana instance as i dont need the data to be live. I know there are 3 ways of doing this, making my local machine a node in the ES cluster, taking a snapshot and transferring it or using elasticdump and transferring the file. i understand the issues with adding my local as a node but dont understand the difference between a snapshot and elasticdump.
What is the difference between a snapshot and elasticdump? what are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

A:

elasticdump will simply scan one index in your remote ES cluster and will either dump the JSON data into a file it can then replay to rebuild the index in the same or some other ES instance (remote or local). 
elasticdump can also store the data it pumps from your remote ES directly into your local instance (instead of storing the data into a file).
Snapshot/restore is the official way of backuping your index data. There are various targets (filesystem, S3, etc), but the main idea is that you do a first snapshot and then all subsequent snapshots will be incremental, i.e. the snapshot process will only store what has changed since the last run.
In your case, you can go either way, but using elasticdump is straightforward if all you want to do is to have a local copy of your production data.

