I have a Rev C-5 hub with the Hubitat-provided Australian frequency ZWave USB stick.
While I have nightly off-device backups via cron and a cold spare C-5 hub and cold spare Hubitat-provided Australian frequency ZWave USB stick, I am concerned that failure of the live ZWave USB stick would cause significant disruption to our family given we'd need to move almost 100 ZWave devices across to the cold spare. This includes a large number of difficult to access devices (ceiling space, under floor, behind large appliances etc).
I have read several forum postings where the advice is to use an Aeotec Z-Stick as it has a Windows-based backup and restore feature, but my issues with that are:
We already have 2 x Z-Wave sticks provided by Hubitat
We already paired a Hubitat-provided stick to almost 100 ZWave devices
I don't have a Windows computer (I'd have to borrow one)
Does anyone know how to use a tool to backup the Hubitat-provided sticks, ideally using some open source or Hubitat-provided tooling?
The Aeon tool might work with any similar USB stick, including the Zooz or Nortek, but I have a Z-Stick and haven't verified this for sure (but do have both so could test). If not, I think Zensys Tools (login required, but tip: search bugmenot.com) may have a similar feature that should work with these. However, neither will rid you of that Windows dependency. I read someone on the OpenHAB forums had luck doing this through a Windows 10 VM (you can basically download an image and use it on a trial basis for a certain number of days if you don't have a license), but I imagine it's tricky to get USB configured correctly to work well for that. I'm not sure if Open Z-Wave offers any backup tools, but that would at least run on Linux (I'm guessing not or I assume the only system I've run on top of OZW, Home Assistant, would have exposed this, but I don't know).
Something else you could consider is getting a second Z-Stick (or Nortek, etc.) and using it as a secondary controller. If it "knows" about all your devices, when it dies, you might be able to promote it to primary without any disruption to your devices/automations. Here's from Z-Stick to Z-Stick with Aeon's tool (looks like it even talks about two different models, so you might have some luck doing this from a Nortek to an Aeon, but if not I'm sure the other software has similar, corresponding options):
Most of this is not anything I have ever tried, just things I've read about, so maybe others can chime in with personal experience. I think dying sticks are rare, however (dying hubs are too but I imagine that might be a little more common), so hopefully it's nothing you'll ever actually have to worry about.
Hubitat has not provided any solution for this, although they acknowledge it's on their To-Do list.
ZWave supports additional controllers. I have an Aeon Z-Stick from years ago and I quite often join it to my existing ZWave mesh and in doing so, get a copy of the on-stick-db. Because it's Aeon, I can then use Aeon's backup software to make a disk copy.. which I do.
I have two Hubitat Hubs with their ZWave radios enabled, That means I have two independent ZWave Meshes. Therefore, I do the above twice, once for each Hub.
The tools ARE Windows only. OZWCP/ZenTools/Aeon Backup are all .exe and thus must be run on windows. My solution is to use a virtual Windows Machine via VirtualBox, although there are at least two others as popular. As I said, I do this periodically. Whenever I feel the need, which is when I've added enough ZWave devices that I don't want to re-join them. Meaning, a VM works really well. I have an entire VM dedicated because why not.. it's just a few gigs of HDD space.
OZWCP and ZenTools both offer an option to 'promote' a Controller to Primary. What it fails to do however is push the stick's ZWave address to #1. In other words, the ZWave controller in each of our hubs is using ZWave address #1 and each joined device gets the next number. If you join another controller then it gets the next number too.. let's say for discussion, it gets a ZWave address of #111. If you use that stick as your primary, then all the Associations on each device would have to be updated to stop sending unsolicited reports to device #1 but instead send them to #111. I've read some pretty complicated 'dance moves' to get that to happen. There's also a 'recipe' using two Z-Sticks to get one of them to join using #1... the basic technique is you mark the #1 'slot' as dead and the join/exclude/reset repeatedly until the address counter wraps and you join as #1.
I have done a Controller Shift in my life and it was not too bad but I only had 20 ZWave devices at the time.
