I have recently subscribed to hub-protect and purchased a C8P. I plan to use the new C8P as a backup. My question is should I activate and update the C8P before returning it to storage and should I connect and update it periodically? Or is any of that necessary?
Thanks
Ideally you'll want the firmware on your production and backup hubs to agree - don't have to worry about backup incompatibility that way.
Understood, so should I just put it away and update it when / if my main hub fails? Should I register it now?
That’s what I have done. Not sure if that is correct though.
I would register it (one less thing to go wrong in a crunch) and get it current. After that, recovery time is generally under 20 minutes even if you need to upgrade the firmware.
I’ve never really seen the point of trying to keep a 2nd hub always updated as a backup. I think I would spend more time trying to keep it current, compared to the time it will take to just restore the last cloud backup to it should the current hub fail.
My only interest in something like that would be if it could be a true fail-over hub that just kicks in automatically when the main hub fails, and also automatically keeps itself updated to the level of the main hub.
When you add a new device to the main hub, how would you keep that in sync on your backup hub?
Only way to keep devices in sync currently is to restore a cloud backup to it (due to the radios). Couple options for keeping the firmware updated though.
Yeah, that is my point. It seems just restoring the cloud backup to it just once on hub fail day is easier than constantly restoring cloud backups to keep the backup at current level. It might save an hour on fail day, but you will spend multiple hours keeping it current to the latest cloud backup to keep device pairings in sync.
A fail-over solution would be great though. Put a 2nd hub in “fail-over” mode, and it automatically installs the latest cloud backup at at night at some selected interval, from the backup of the main hub it is tied to. The backup hub would need to sit is some resting state with radios off, until it is needed to kick-in as a failover when it detects a main hub failure.
I think Hubitat is missing sales here, if they developed a fail-over hub solution, people would start buying 2nd hubs. A fail-over subscription would also bring in subscription dollars, and maybe as part of subscribing to fail-over, you get a discount on the backup hub that you will need to buy.
I'd have to poke around a little to see how that exchange is handled (cloud restore), but on the surface it's doable, and most of the remaining code is in a project I did a few years back ([BETA] Hub Failover - AKA an opportunity to protect or destroy your environment) - it would need some updates (was written for the C-7), and I would need to put in a mechanism to automatically put the restored hub back into standby mode as after restore it would believe that it is the primary (old code has that as a manual step).