When a specific node is down, all the new ingestion will be handled by the remaining nodes.
But the data queued on the down node will be there on that node until the node comes back. If this is HW failure such as disk failure and the node can't be brought back, stuck data will be lost.
Since NiFi is not a storage system but more of an In/out pipeline, we expect the data that is pushed to NiFi not to be the only copy. systems that are pushing data to NiFi should have some room to keep the data intact for some buffer days/hrs until it is processed.
NiFi does not provide any sort of backup/restore or real-time replication.
To avoid such data loss it is expected to have the data at source for some time until data is processed by NiFi for further downstream processing.
Hope this helps.
Thank you