Unfortunately, upon further testing, my above suggestion about using only the set-policy does not actually solve the issue.
The reason my testing above worked with restore was only because I left out the problematic set-cluster-policy autoscaling rule for replica count. And the truth is that restore was already always working when that cluster autoscaling rule was missing. The key point is that I only tested restore functionality above. When I tested to see if autoscaling itself still worked by adding/placing replicas within our intended limits, that part wasn't working. Now it seems we are back to the two workarounds mentioned previously: 1. Clear out the cluster-policy for replica count, restore, then add back the cluster-policy. 2. Create or modify your collections attaching a 'rule=replica:<2,node:*' to match your autoscaling policy. Out of curiousity, I did try testing using both the set-cluster-policy and the set-policy where I used MODIFYCOLLECTION to attach the policy to my collection similar to attaching a rule to the collection, but that produced the same error when attempting to restore: "Error getting replica locations : No node can satisfy the rules "[{replica=<2, node=#ANY, shard=#EACH, collection=gettingstarted}]" -- Sent from: https://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Solr-User-f472068.html