Elasticsearch 1.7.1 not creating a snapshot, but not reporting error either - elasticsearch

Question

I'm trying to create a snapshot of all indexes in my local Elasticsearch instance.
I've set path.repo as follows in elasticsearch.yml:
path.repo: ["F:\\backup\\elasticsearch"]
And here's the command I'm using to create the snapshot:
curl -XPUT http://localhost:9200/_snapshot/my_test_backup -d '
{
"type": "fs",
"settings": {
"location": "F:\\backup\\elasticsearch\\my_test_backup"
}
}'
Executing this generates the following output from Elasticsearch:
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 136 100 21 100 115 269 1474 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1854{"acknowledged":true}
Note, no error.
There are a couple of indexes set up on my local instance, which aren't particularly large so, when I check the snapshot status, it shows no in progress snapshots:
$ curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/_snapshot/_status
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 16 100 16 0 0 1000 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1000{"snapshots":[]}
As I say, this isn't necessarily a worry because the snapshot would be small anyway. I can see the snapshot I've just created by executing the following, but it appears to have hung:
$ curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/_snapshot
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 100 100 100 0 0 100 0 0:00:01 --:--:-- 0:00:01 97k{"my_test_backup":{"type":"fs","settings":{"location":"F:\\backup\\elasticsearch\\my_test_backup"}}}
Consistent with this, when I navigate to F:\backup\elasticsearch\my_test_backup the folder is empty.
Could somebody tell me why my snapshot isn't working? What am I doing wrong?
Many thanks,
Bart

Answer 1

All you have done there is to create a repository, not a snapshot. Creating a repository is a necessary artifact that will store all future snapshots you will create.
So now that you have your repository, you can simply kick off the snapshot creation as follows:
curl -XPUT "localhost:9200/_snapshot/my_test_backup/snapshot_1"
If you run the following command instead, it will only return when the snapshot is done:
curl -XPUT "localhost:9200/_snapshot/my_test_backup/snapshot_1?wait_for_completion=true"