title: Backup and restore elasticsearch - elasticdump?
body: <p>I'm new to elasticsearch and have been using it to store scraped data from the web and passing it to kibana for analysis.</p>
  
  <p>However I keep needing to tune my mappings.  From what I gather I can't change mappings of existing fields on the fly.  So far every time I've had to make an adjustment to my mappings I've had to delete the index, create a new mapping and then kick of my crawl again (painful!) .</p>
  
  <p>So what I'd like to do is easily back up the data from existing crawls and the mappings separately, so I can restore perhaps just the data as I incrementally adjust my mappings.</p>
  
  <p>I've looked at using elasticdump, but whilst it seems fairly obvious that I can create json outputs of mappings and data, can I also use elasticdump to reimport the data and/or mappings from those created and archived json files?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any thoughts / advice!</p>