Add a note about using the `retry_failed` flag before accepting data loss
@@ -83,8 +83,26 @@ Reasons why a primary shard cannot be automatically allocated include the follow
the cluster. To prevent data loss, the system does not automatically promote a stale
shard copy to primary.
-As a manual override, two commands to forcefully allocate primary shards
-are available:
+[float]
+=== Retry failed shards
+
+The cluster will attempt to allocate a shard a maximum of
+`index.allocation.max_retries` times in a row (defaults to `5`), before giving
+up and leaving the shard unallocated. This scenario can be caused by
+structural problems such as having an analyzer which refers to a stopwords
+file which doesn't exist on all nodes.
+
+Once the problem has been corrected, allocation can be manually retried by
+calling the <<cluster-reroute,`reroute`>> API with `?retry_failed`, which
+will attempt a single retry round for these shards.
+
+[float]
+=== Forced allocation on unrecoverable errors
+
+The following two commands are dangerous and may result in data loss. They are
+meant to be used in cases where the original data can not be recovered and the cluster
+administrator accepts the loss. If you have suffered a temporary issue that has been
+fixed, please see the `retry_failed` flag described above.
`allocate_stale_primary`::
Allocate a primary shard to a node that holds a stale copy. Accepts the
@@ -108,15 +126,3 @@ are available:
this command requires the special field `accept_data_loss` to be
explicitly set to `true` for it to work.
-[float]
-=== Retry failed shards
-
-The cluster will attempt to allocate a shard a maximum of
-`index.allocation.max_retries` times in a row (defaults to `5`), before giving
-up and leaving the shard unallocated. This scenario can be caused by
-structural problems such as having an analyzer which refers to a stopwords
-file which doesn't exist on all nodes.
-
-Once the problem has been corrected, allocation can be manually retried by
-calling the <<cluster-reroute,`reroute`>> API with `?retry_failed`, which
-will attempt a single retry round for these shards.
