Is it possible to use a spare hub like this?

Here is a naive question:

Suppose it was essential to have a Hubitat hub functioning correctly at all times, and it suddenly was to go down (for whatever reason). Could it be possible to restore a working backup from that Hubitat hub to a spare hub until the issue with the first hub gets resolved? Is it that simple, or is a backup tied to a distinct hub UID and/or MAC address? I'm guessing the latter.

If you have hub protect you can restore with the z-wave radio. You cannot restore zigbee this way. You would have to reset every zigbee device and re pair it (though they would slot into the new hubitat with the save parameters). You also cannot do fail over. Both types of protocols are designed to work with one controller at a time. They cannot be paired to multiple controllers. As a last note, hubitat (and by any extension) should never be in a critical role. They aren't designed for it.

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It's possible, but it's not going to provide hot fail over. It's an manual process at best.

I did this for my C-7 to my spare hub. You can restore a backup and everything will be known, but you then need to manually go through all your Zigbee and Z-wave devices and reset and re-pair them.

If you pay for Hub Protect, your Z-Wave radio gets restored and that will save a ton of work. But I have 100 Zigbee devices, and it took 2 days to get them all talking to the restored hub. I also had to regenerate the authentication for 2 web connected services.

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Thanks, it looks like Hub Protect is the answer. The rest is understood,

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OK, cool. I do have a Hub Protect subscription and most of my devices are Z-Wave. This gives me peace of mind. Thanks!

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I went through this very process a couple of months ago. I had hub protect and mostly z-wave devices. Z-wave devices were NOT working on the restored hub. Opened a ticket with Hubitat, they found the firmware problem, and that same day released a public firmware update that solved my issue. I've never seen firmware issues fixed so fast. Going forward it shouldn't be an issue unless there's a regression.

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