Please note that Elasticsearch provides the python based Curator which manages closing/deleting and maintenance with lots of tuning capabilities. It is worth investigating Curator as an elasticsearch-maintained solution for your cluster's time-based index maintenance needs.
If you are using Curator with Elasticsearch >= 1.0.0 (and Hubot) and you want a way to restore old indices, try hubot-elk-restore.
If you prefer to roll your own, or need functionality that's not (yet) available in Curator, these scripts may serve as a good starting point. This collection of bash scripts for manages Elasticsearch indices. They are specifically designed around the daily index pattern used in Logstash.
Support is integrated for uploading backups to S3 using s3cmd.
Each script has samples included, use '-h' or check the source.
These are heavily inspired by a previous collection of scripts.
This script generically walks through the indices, sorts them lexicographically, and deletes anything older than the configured number of indices.
This script generically walks through the indices, sorts them lexicographically, and closes indices older than the configured number of indices.
Backup handles making a backup and a restore script for a given index. The default is yesterday's index, or you can pass a specific date for backup. You can optionally keep the backup locally, and/or push it to s3. If you want to get tricky, you can override the s3cmd command, and you could have this script push the backups to a storage server on your network (or whatever you want, really).
Restore handles retrieving a backup file and restore script (from S3), and then executing the restore script locally after download.
Handle creating, listing and restoring snapshots and snapshot repositories on the cluster (not locally)
Something like this might be helpful, assuming you placed the scripts in the /opt/es/ directory (formatted for an /etc/cron.d/ file):
00 7 * * * root /bin/bash /opt/es/elasticsearch-backup-index.sh -b "s3://es-bucket" -i "/opt/elasticsearch/data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices" -c "s3cmd put -c /path/to/.s3cfg"
00 9 * * * root /bin/bash /opt/es/elasticsearch-remove-old-indices.sh -i 21