Putting this in Lounge, not sure what to think. This is the first time I have had something like this happen after hundreds of devices, and dozens of rules.
So I added a new Zwave switch, or tried to. I had just got done adding a different Zwave switch, and that went just fine. I could not for the life of me either include or exclude this second switch. I tried every form of power cycling the switch, tapping buttons on the switch, factory reset the switch and so on.
So I decided to move the hub closer to the switch. I shut down the hub, found a long cord, tried to boot the hub. It took like 20 minutes to come back to the main menu. That was weird, never done that before. It finally was up and running, and I was able to finally exclude this switch and then include it by holding the hub virtually on top of the switch. I paired my Schlage locks in place for crying out loud, why did I have trouble with this one switch?
Second weirdness. After shutting down again, moving the hub back to it's normal resting place and rebooting, I apparently lost everything I have done today. I had spent like hours renaming things, playing with Rule Machine, changing button controller functions, and so on. I lost it all. The last backup was for last night at the normal maintenance period.
I should have been more careful and backed up a hard copy before I shut down, but I have shut down before without issue, and in fact shouldn't the hub be saving the changes I made upon shutdown? I even rebooted earlier today and that should have saved my work, no?
It appears to me that the database corrupted upon shutdown or startup for some reason. Very strange, I wonder what happened?
I added a few switches a few weeks ago the first added on the second try the other would exclude but not include on multiple tries. I went into settings Z-Wave and disabled the Z-Wave radio for a minute then turned it back on and gave it a minute then I was able to join the switch on the first try. Your shutdown and unplugging it should have reset the Z-Wave radio too as far as loosing things on shutdown, that isn't normal but it does sound like there was some kind of corruption and the hub probably corrected it by automatically reloading the last backup.
I had something similar happen. On restart I watching it loading and it got stuck for a while around 20%, burped, and started from 0 again. When it loaded up it had the previous day's backup loaded and about 18 newly added devices were gone...
You were right about the backup. Do a backup before you start working on anything and then do another when you are done. Particularly if you are shutting down the hub.
Last year when I switched from Wink, I was including many devices at one shot, no issues. This is the first time this has happened. Like I mentioned above, even the hard to include Schlage locks went great.
It was some kind of glitch, I just wonder why it happened like this? It has been running basically a year with intermittent power outages, accidental cord unplugging, shutdowns, and reboots without any issues. Now all the sudden it bombs out and erases a days worth of work?
I wish I knew whether it was a one-off, or a bug, or what. Not that I want to tempt fate, but I wish I could repeat it. There could be some bug lurking somewhere that needs to be investigated by the team.
I would guess it had to do with the combination of pairing and shutdown, and precise timing. The 1st failed pairing created an error, the next pairing worked but possibly was in conflict with info from the prior. All wild speculation of course.
After doing a factory reset, I had spent hours today pairing/adding devices and creating rules, etc. Once I was done, rebooted the hub in the evening and for some reason I've lost everything.
When the reboot was done, the hub had no paired devices, no apps, no user drivers.
Now it's too late for me to re-pair everything. I'll restart the whole process tomorrow.
Shut down the hub safely, then unplug it and let it down power then plug it back in. I have heard of this happening in the past and after a shutdown everything returns.
