C4 to C7 Migration Plan

[walksonair]

Just wondering if anyone has any best practices (other than regular Wave mesh building) to move devices over from C4 to C7. I was thinking of getting the C7, then add all new devices to that while slowly moving over devices from the C4 in time...like thinking a room a month.

I'm assuming the C4 can become a slave or master to the C7 while the transition is ingoing all the way to the last device?

[csteele]

It's much the same as migrating from SmartThings.

OR...

You can save a Backup of your C4 and restore it on your shiny new C7 then use Bruce's technique to migrate them.

Migrating a Z-Wave Network

Some people are going to find reasons to migrate a Z-Wave network by hand from one Hubitat Elevation hub to another one. There are steps you can take that will make this a little bit easier than just starting over. In particular, one wants to preserve automations that use Z-Wave devices, and not have to redo them. This would useful for migrating from a C-4 to a C-7. For C-5 to C-7, one can use the Hub Protection Service and avoid all of this work. First of all, familiarize yourself with thi…

[terminal3]

This is basically what I did. You can keep your apps, rules dashboards on your C4 until you get all the devices used by said apps, rules etc moved to the C7 using Hub Mesh. In my case I split my house. Devices on one side went to the C5 and devices on the other went to the C7. Everything was on my C5. Well not everything as I have a third C5 in my detached garage, but that stayed as is,

I took a screenshot of a device page showing what it used, then used that to make sure I had everything set back when I was done. It was a bit tedious as I did one device at a time,

I left all my dashboards on my C5 since they were already setup and then just used Hub mesh to add back devices once moved. In some cases I moved rules from the C5 to the C7 if all the devices using that rule resided on the C7. Any rule that used devices on both stayed on the C5 and I again used Hub mesh to add them back. Moving rules was made much easier since you can export single rules from one hub and then import them to the other.

[672southmain]

@walksonair

I'm assuming the C4 can become a slave or master to the C7 while the transition is ingoing all the way to the last device?

As others note above, one approach is to use Hub Connect or Hub Mesh. If using Hub Mesh, the two Hubitat Hubs have to be on the same firmware revision. If that’s the route you go, understand that each hub is managing its own Z-Wave mesh, and the two meshes are separate.

If, instead, you choose the migration route using Bruce Ravenel’s guide for manual migration, be aware that you have two parallel meshes. As you build the new (C-7) mesh and move each device from one hub/mesh to another, the C-7 mesh starts out weak and grows stronger as you move devices to its mesh, while the C-4 mesh starts out strong and grows weaker as you remove devices from the C-4. At some point the C-7 mesh starts working well, and, at some point, the C-4 mesh starts working poorly.

Best to build out from the C-7 in quadrants/slices to the perimeter so that the C-7 mesh comes up strong in that direction.

Or, you can rip the Band-Aid off, remove everything from the C-4, start building out from the center.