I have had a C5 hub for about 6 months now and after finally adding enough zwave and zigbee repeaters things seem pretty stable over my 2500' first floor devices.
I recently bought a C7 in order to have a backup device and to take advantage of the new zwave capabilities such as showing the zwave network mesh chart.
I'm looking for suggestions and latest thinking on how to best use both of the C5 and C7 hubs with the 2.2.4 release that supports multiple hubs. For instance -
Should I just migrate everything to the C7 and keep the C5 offline for a physical backup?
If I only using one hub at a time, can I reliably use the standard backup and restore to go back and forth between the C5 and C7 or do I need Hub Protection Services to do that?
Is Hub Protection Services even available yet? Will it let me restore a C7 backup to a C5 in the event of failure of the C7?
Should I use both hubs at the same time somehow for real time redundancy or is this more trouble than it is worth if I don't need two hubs for the radio coverage?
Well if a hub goes down, that's it. Any devices connected to it will go down with the ship. You can't connect 1 device to multiple hubs (though they are working on a clean way to transfer devices via config) You can do hub mesh, share devices and control them from either hub. Some people split zigbee and z-wave between hubs or run rules on one, devices on the other. Failover though with the current firmware isn't available but that would be a neat feature.
We don't know a lot about the Hub Protection Service.. it's been teased and there's been no update other than "the C-7 ZWave issues caused the project to be delayed" or words to that effect.
It's been teased as being C-5 to C-7, but I haven't noticed anything that would prevent the other direction... if it can read the C-5's Radio to send it to the C-7, then one could extrapolate that the C-7 is also readable and that the C-5 is also writable.
The difference between the C-5 and the C-7 is ZWave, therefore it would be my suggestion you use the C-5 for your Zigbee and only migrate your ZWave to the C-7. Although as others have said, any form of 'split' is likely to work well.
What would be the benefit of a split? If no inherent failover redundancy, I'm leaning toward just migrating to the C7 and keeping the C5 as an offline powered off backup that I can restore to if the C7 dies until I have a real need to run both hubs at once.
You're correct in thinking you can keep the C-5 around until you need it, and it will 'arrive' much faster than ordering one on the morning the other dies.
But...
Why keep it in a box? It can be a backup AND be operational too.
I'm VERY VERY biased because I currently have a 'production set' of 4 Hubitat hubs and more than a few other 'hubs' that comprise my total system. One of the 4 is a C-7 that is getting a few devices migrated, very slowly. But the target is NOT to replace any of the existing 3, just further subdivide my home. I built each hub to be as standalone as possible...
I imagine my home is a very small apartment building with a Hubitat hub in each. I try to keep each hub independent from any other hub. Thus any hub failure affects only that apartment.. or physical area in my case.
Sorry just reinforcing what @csteele said - I mean I strongly agree. I've run multiple hubs - 4 at a time. 2 C-4s and 2 C-5's. The C-4s were by location one for the main floor one for the 2nd floor. For the C-5's one was development the other was for Cloud processes. Worked very well.
Now that I have a C-7 my plan has changed a bit.. I migrated all the Z-Wave devices over because of the upgraded Z-Wave radio. I decided that I am going to keep my Zigbee devices on a separate hub - a C-5 since the Zigbee radios are essentially the same as the C-7's.