I opened a support ticket via email on October 8th, it was acknowledged initially then I was asked to do a couple of things via an email reply from Hubitat support. Their email literally says “Your request has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email.” Then when I tried to report back the suggestion didn’t work I received an auto reply saying – “Our system does not recognize replies to this ticket, so you will not receive any further response.”
Then after a week of me sending more emails I received a response saying the ticket was escalated to the Engineering team. Its now ben a week since then and no communication or response to additional emails from me requesting an update.
@neonturbo has tagged support for you. In the meantime, perhaps someone from the community may have helpful suggestions if you would like the community’s help.
Hi there, as mentioned in our last email, the reason your ticket has been escalated is because we continue to see considerable amount of errors in your hub's error log that are not related to Z-Wave or a hardware malfunction. Please see my PM for more details.
Need some additional help here - I was in the middle of working with BobbyD as he was arranging for a replacement of my hub. For some reason about a week ago he suddenly stopped responding to my PMs and I am in limbo with nothing working. I have had this ticket open for several weeks now and support from Hubitat has been sporadic at best. I hope BobbyD is OK.
Can someone @ Hubitat support pick this up & re-engage with me on replacing my hub and resolving my issue?
Got your PM yesterday with the 6 questions, but you said you weren't in a rush, so I didn't get to answer today. Will tackle them in the morning, if that's ok.
No issue - I just didn't get an ack so I was concerned you had a family issue going on or something. My 92 year old dad is actually recovering from getting home from the hospital and all I hear is "my light switch doesn't work" - lol....
Once the new hub ships / arrives I just want to get a game plan / procedure together of how to most efficiently put humpty dumpty back together understanding I will need to redo most (but not) everything ).
Sorry for needing to post an SOS here on the public forum again but @BobbyD (and some colleagues he added to a private thread) have all suddenly gone dark again for nearly a week now in working my issue that has dragged on now for over a month. Pattern has been we have a couple of messages back and forth then no replay from anyone at Hubutat for as long as a week despite my continuing pings. I have my 92 year old dad that lives with us and he is getting annoyed that the "lights don't work right" anymore....
I received a hub replacement as part of my HubProtect subscription last Friday and I simply need instructions on how to get it swapped out / registered on my account and more importantly a bunch of questions around the cloud restore process as it relates to the radios needs to be answered. I submitted these basic questions weeks ago that still aren't answered and I have new hardware sitting in a box I can't use.
No hard feelings against @BobbyD or Hubitat support in general but I did pay for the HubProtect service that advertises hardware replacement AND a cloud backup service that exclusively retains radio info so when you install a new hub you shouldn't need to start over from scratch. Due to weeks of delays in responses since I first contacted support my cloud backups that I needed to restore from have since rolled off (the ones that were created when things were working) so the longer this drags on the more work I need to do in order to get everything working again.
My issue should have been solved a month ago and I am simply not satisfied with the support and just want to get my issue resolved.
To be clear, HubConnect backs up and restores the Hub's database and the z-wave radio database. Zigbee devices will have to be reset and re-paired to the hub, but will fall into place with their existing names and device ids. All that is indicated in the documentation that @ogiewon linked to.
Yes I am aware of that article but I submitted a step by step migration plan (see below) I put together for my particular case 14 days ago I asked for review / comment since I have a group of "orphaned" Z-wave devices. I am still waiting for an answer from someone / anyone @ Hubutat support,
Again note that when I first submitted a ticket to Hubitat Support via an email as per the website instructions it was more than a month ago. At that time I had a good cloud backup when everything was working (zwave devices) that has since rolled off now forcing me to restore from a point after the failure so now I can't restore my zwave devices creating a ton of rework that could have been avoided if this issue was addressed promptly without weeks of delay.
Here is what I sent in the private thread;
Based on those answers is the following "recovery procedure" going to work? My goal is to do the least amount of rework as possible.
Step 1 - With existing old hub temporarily rename all existing Z-wave devices which are essentially ghosts now. Purpose of renaming them is because the existing rules are dependent of them existing.
Step 2 - Force a cloud backup
Step 3 - Install the new hub once I receive it and then do a cloud restore. In theory this should recover my Zigbee devices successfully and also bring in the recently renamed Z-Wave devices (in name only understanding the z-wave connectivity is broken). *At the time I forgot that zigbee cant be restored.
Step 4 - Do a factory reset on my Z-Wave controllers and import them into the new hub. After all of the old Z-wave devices are discovered edit all of the rules switching over from the dummy names to the new real devices.
Step 5 - Delete all of the old devices that had the dummy placeholder names.
You never have to start from scratch with either the protect service or a local backup. The protect service transfers the Zwave radio information and all your rules, automations, Zigbee table (but Zigbee pairing) the dashboards and so on.
The local backup is similar but it does not backup the Zwave radio, so if you use that, you will have to include (join) these devices again and fix all the rules.
Zigbee always needs to be put back into pairing mode, (for both backup methods) but they will "pop into place" once joined, and won't break any rules or automations.
Sounds like you want to want to migrate to a new hub, and then start over with Z-wave, correct? If so, then yes, the process you’ve outlined seems alright. Why not simply try it? If you’re not happy with the result, then I believe you should be able to start over and adjust your process as needed to achieve whatever goals you’ve set.
I personally have not attempted a Hub Protect Backup Migration, and I also do not use Z-wave at all. But I have been using Hubitat as my main home automation platform since February 2018. So, I do have a lot of history with the platform. I hope you’re able to get things sorted out soon. Best of luck!
FWIW, I've done Hub Protect migrations twice, including once yesterday. There are several versions saved on the cloud - can you not use an older version that doesn't have a corrupted z-wave radio database backup?
So basically I have 50+ Kasa IP light switches (which are thankfully super easy to get back with just a regular backup / restore), a few Zigbee motion sensor, several Zwave water sensors, and several Zooz Scene controllers. I have a boatload of button rules in place based on these controllers.
Everything was working great about a couple of months ago.
Then suddenly my Zwave devices all stopped working all at once. All logs showed no activity after about the same day. Nothing else had changed so the failure was a complete mystery. I was away at the time and didn't discover all of this until a couple weeks passed.
Initially I thought my zwave radio on the hub had died so I contacted support. This is when I lost weeks of time with not getting responses first from the email support and then even after I received a response from Hubitat support here it was still message in a bottle taking days+ to get a reply.
Once the Hubitat folks determined my zwave radio "seemed" to be OK they also discovered my zwave network was totally broken and I needed to restore from the cloud backup to a replacement hub which took another two weeks to get to me. Problem was so much time had passed with the slow responses there was no cloud backup still available that was BEFORE the failure. They only keep a limited number of cloud backups apparently and then they scroll off. This is how I got forced into the situation I am in now.
My zwave devices and associated buttons are listed still in the hub but the devices for whatever reason are disassociated with the hub in terms of cummunication. I can do a factory reset on the devices but they won't pair back to the hub - this is why a new hub was sent to me.
So I seem to have a chicken & egg problem right? If I just restore to the new hub from a backup the zwave devices will come back but they will still be disassociated since as I am told they are just "ghosts" now. My restored buttons will all be associated to them also. I then need to do a factory reset of all of my Zwave devices and re-add them but their names will already exist thus this is the reason I came up with the idea of renaming them BEFORE the restore, adding them back using the correct names, swapping everything within the buttons, then deleting the dummy names.
All of this work is basically due to the dependencies.
Argh. I guess I will read up on the suggestions above and give my plan a shot tomorrow as I have nothing to lose.
I just noticed some other goofy things. In my backup / restore section despite the fact that I have the cloud backup interval set to DAILY the last cloud backup was in September! I just tried a manual cloud backup and its not listed on the menu after it was finished.
What if on my existing hub I do a "Platform Reset (keeps radio settings" and then try to restore back to my original hub? Does this platform reset do a "deeper" factory reset that might fix the underlying issue. I tried simply restoring to my exiting hub before but that didn't fix anyhthing.
As mentioned a month ago in our private message, a device corrupted your Z-Wave network beyond recovery, and you do not have a good cloud backup taken from before the Z-Wave incident. That means, you will need to start over by excluding, resetting and including each Z-Wave device. You can restore a recent local backup from your old hub to recover any settings, rules, apps, and custom code.
If you had performed a cloud backup restore the moment you first observed issues with Z-Wave devices, you wouldn't be in the situation you are today. But as the time passed, all of your cloud backups now contain the corrupted Z-Wave, so restoring a cloud backup on your new hub, would result in the same issue experienced with the old hub.
Once your new hub is up and running, please send us an email to support@hubitat.com so we can transfer your Hub Protect service from the old hub to the new hub.
Respectfully @bobbyD both Habitat's initial unresponsiveness (going dark for two weeks after initially responding to my ticket opened via email as per your process) and your likewise pattern of the same inattentiveness over the past number of weeks is completely unacceptable especially for a service I paid for. Further your response just above blaming me, the customer, is frankly offensive & condescending. If you read my latest note (or probed my issue fully weeks ago) you would have realized that your HubProtect backup service has also stopped working and despite the fact its set to backup nightly it hasn't completed a cloud backup since September around the time the zwave devices disappeared and even now won't do one even on demand. I as a customer did absolutely nothing wrong through this ordeal as I have followed your support process.
I would like a new engineer assigned to my case immediately plus at a minimum I would like a courtesy phone call from him / her to go over all of this and figure out at a minimum why I can't even get a cloud backup.
You think this might be because your zwave radio database is irretrievably corrupted? Just a guess.
Maybe so. What zwave device did you add that started the issue with your zwave radio? Was it a secondary controller - that can be a powerful tool to clean up a mesh, or alternatively kill it.
Wait - you’re expecting concierge service for $30 bucks a year?!!
The most logical reason you can’t get a cloud backup working is that the zwave radio is irretrievably corrupted. Or there are issues caused by custom code.
I was a beta tester for Hub Protect. I’ve moved hubs three times restoring cloud backups, and my weekly cloud backups have never failed.
What I expect (regardless if the service costs $30 or $3K a year) is that when I initially open a ticket via the prescribed process my emails don't get ignored after the initial acknowledgement for days and weeks at a time. In this case the email back and forth is Hubitat's process for opening a ticket. It was only after I got frustrated after a couple of weeks of no response that I went to the public forums here and started this thread trying to get some sort of escalation / resolution. @bobbyD initially promptly made contact with me but then during routine back and forth of replies working the issue he would ignore messages for days and weeks also.
I am just a dumb customer trying to get my hub back in order. The customer service experience I have endured to date is inexcusable and yes, someone at Hubitat should be greatly concerned about how badly the ball has been dropped with my case and eager to reach out to me with a simple phone call to expedite solving the issue.
