Hi all,
With the number of devices in my house growing. I'm wondering what would happen if I had a major Hub failure. At the moment, I would need to order myself a new hub and get that setup.
I was wondering in the case of setting up a new hub, how successful would a database restore be? Or is there configuration information also stored on the Z-wave dongle (I'm in australia and also use the third party z-wave dongle that was supplied with the HE hub) that is not included in the database backup.
I was hoping to get some fail safes and redundancy ideas from this community. My family has been very tolerant of me setting up and playing with this stuff. But I think loosing functionalilty of a large chunk of the house for an extended period would be an end to all my tinkering and fun.
Look forward to hearing what other people are doing.
If you were to move your stick from one hub to the other and then do a restore, everything should come back the way it was. If the stick also dies, then you would have to rejoin all your devices and replace them in every single app/automation/rule by hand.
OK so worst case scenario and the dongle and hub die, it wouldn't be a fun exercise. I have heard of people running 2 hubs for various reasons. Would it be possible to have 2 complete hubs up and running including 2 z-wave dongles and then having the primary replicating to the secondary. But the secondary is inactive in all other ways. Then if the primary fails completly, you can just enable the secondary in some way.
Is it possible to replicate a zwave dongle by any other means? plugging into computers etc. I know it's unlikely, hubitat seems fairly stable but things happen. I had a cat pee on a computer once and killed it. So I'm just trying to come up with a bit of a disaster recovery plan lol
So this would imply that if I had two C4 hubs kept reasonably current on firmware, only used one(#1) and stored the other(#2), in case of a major crash on #1 I could rmove its stick, download the latest backup from #1 to #2, plug #1's stick into #2 I would most likely be back on line? (maybe with some rules lost but all devices accessible.)
That would be great!
If your hub was dead, you would not be able to get the backup off it. You would have to download the backup periodically There are many, MANY posts walking you through how to do that. You would not need to keep the C4 firmware updated. You would update that when you first pulled it out and set it up.
All of your devices and automations should be restored as long as you use the same stick and go from C-4 hub to C-4 hub.
I was thinking of keeping them mostly around same firmware revision. Create a new backup just before major update. Then use #2 in-case I did something stupid resulting in a non responsive hub #1. (I know the odds are very low but it seems to have happened to a couple of users in last round of updates) Getting a second hub operational for me would be cheap insurance. Probably never use it for this but could be used as test hub as well.
That is not the recommended way to recover from an unresponsive hub. Anything software does to the hub, software can recover from. The releases we are getting are tested. You would have to roll back to previous platform version and then to a previous database copy but you would not want to swap hubs. This is not the way to go about backing up.
Z-wave yes, zigbee no.
There is a tool from aeon labs that can backup/restore the z-wave stick using a pc.
I have sucessfully used the aeon labs tool to ‘clone’ my zwave stick and it worked perfectly for me.
I’ll try and dig out a link today for you.
I’m in the UK so also have a C4 with ‘dongles’ too.
My disaster recovery would be to take the dongles, put them into a new hub and restore a backup.
(I have scripts that auto backup to a pc every day)
This is something I have tested and know it works.
The only thing I can’t do is restore any zigbee stick data so would have to join all my devices to a new zigbee stick should it fail.
Thanks for the comments, I like the idea of script auto backing up db. So the big problem remaining is zigbee stuff. I've got a bunch of those as well. Out of curiosity, has a hubitat hub ever fully failed?
You can easily make manual backups and move them to Dropbox etc. As long as you make backups after making changes to your setup you don't need anything complicated.
I have an Aeon stick paired to my HE C5 hub. I have that stick connected to a Linux machine running Open Zwave Control Panel. I can shut down the HE hub and still control lights through OZWCP.
But keep in mind this is a bit easier than having to re-join Z-Wave devices. For Zigbee, the hub remembers the Zigbee device's factory-set MAC address, and it will use that to put it back back into place as the existing device (just with a new DNI), also keeping it in all your apps/automations. The only tough part is re-joining them all. For Z-Wave, it could be easier if Hubitat supported the Z-Wave "Replace" feature, but as-is, the hub/stick will assign the device a new node ID and you will indeed have to switch that device out for the "old" one in any apps/automations manually. Luckily, as you noted, if you have a Z-Stick, there's a backup tool, so this should be avoidable.
If you're in North America or elsewhere with an HUSBZB-1 for Z-Wave, I'm not sure what backup options exist for that (can OZWCP or the Z-Wave tool Zooz provides for OTA firmware upgrades do something similar?). And obviously the internal radios on a C5 complicate this. But also luckily, Hubitat has also stated that network backup/restores are on their radar--we just don't know when. In the meantime, I've never been to worried about Zigbee, and I'm feeling a lot better about Z-Wave now that I decided to switch to a Z-Stick that I'm able to back up.
