In the past, when I had a C-5 hub fail, I had to go around the house and exclude every single device by hand, and then redo inclusion by hand before I was able to utilize the replacement C-5 hu.
Is there a solution which allows me to avoid this hassle? The number of devices I own in a bit overwhelming to go through the exclusion/inclusion if a hub fails.
Does the shared hub mesh feature allow a kind of fail over in case one of the hub dies without requiring repairing? I am happy to run redundant hubs if one hubs stays in standby mode and takes over in case the primary dies.
As of right now failover is not supported. It does seem to me though, that if one had a hub that used the external stick, assuming the stick was not the component that failed, one could restore a back up to another hub and transfer the stick.....
The upcoming Hub Protection Service (subscription required, details TBA) will help with this for Z-Wave. Zigbee will still require a re-pair, but since the hub will recognize those as the same devices (unlike Z-Wave), the process isn't that bad. LAN devices and whatnot should be fine unless you have anything like a static IP or specific MAC address "hardcoded" on the other end that you'd need to change for some custom integration (can't think of any stock ones that would work like this).
But since you're still on a C-5, the idea above would also work: you could move the stick (plus your hub backup) to another model C-3 through C-5 hub, and all should work. The C-7 will not work with this because it doesn't support external Z-Wave (not sure about Zigbee; guessing it might but wouldn't be surprised if it didn't).
There is occasionally confusion about what Hub Mesh does, but as mentioned, it can't do anything like failover. It's just a way to share a device on one hub to another hub (or more) so that you can use it in apps/automations on that hub even though it is not directly paired to that hub--same idea as Hub Link/Link to Hub and HubConnect, if you are familiar with either of those, though a different way of getting there.
Thank you. I will keep an eye out for this new service.
