It is with great sadness and sorrow, I report to you that my buddy HubiC5 has gone to 0s&1s heaven. When I last checked on him a day ago his always steady and bright green light had regrettably faded into a dark existence. None of the daily rituals that he has always faithfully done were being performed. Efforts to resuscitate my buddy failed. I frantically moved his little RJ45 from port to port on my switch to no advantage. I even hooked his cable to my RJ 45 on the router two no avail. Sadly, he is gone but will always have a place in my heart. Thanks in advance for your kind thought about HubiC5.
BUT, It is with great anticipation, that I am now looking to the future to hopefully gain a new pal, a brand new C7. It should be here today. I am giddy. In advance on my new buddy arriving, I was hoping some of you who have trained your very own C7 could shed some light on the proper upbringing of my new little guy.
I do have a recent backup a couple of weeks old, but nothing has changed in that time.
How much can be restored?
Will it restore the Zigbee, and the Z wave features, or will they have to be reincluded individually?
During my moments of grieving if there is anything else that may offer to help me ease into this new existence with my C7 would be appreciated. I hope for someday in the future to have the admiration and respect for my new C7 as I had for my past HubiC5. I think I shall name her TatC7
Thanks in advance for your help and for allowing me to offer a bit of nonsensical attempted humor
If not just your database. Restore it and your join all of your ZigBee devices and they will fall back into place.
Z-wave is a bit different. 1st make sure there is not a update firmware button on the z-wave page under settings. If there is update it before you do anything else.
Then I would do a radio reset on the z-wave.
Now join all your device one by one working out from the hub.
Providing the device is a simple one you can use app swap now to swap the new device from the old one.
The information that makes your hub yours is stored in a database within the hub. When you do a backup, that database (configuration) is saved, and then you can restore it.
Hubitat offers two entirely optional subscription service to assist their customers. Hub Protection is an extended warranty offer. It allows for scheduled cloud backups that are above and beyond the normal (free/included) backup. Additionally that cloud backup saves a copy of your ZWave radio configuration. Should your Hub die, Hubitat will replace it and using the cloud backup will restore your hub to what you had on the previous hub. (Zigbee is different right now.. more in a moment.)
If you had a Hub Protection subscription, then you would have a cloud backup that will restore everything a local backup has PLUS the ZWave radio config. With that ZWave radio restore, all your ZWave devices just work after the restore. Either type of backup will restore your configuration.. your Location, TZ, all the Automations from all of your Apps and Drivers. Thus the difference between the two is all about the ZWave Radio portion. Yes you have it, making migration much easier, or no you don't making it more difficult because you must go around to each ZWave device and Exclude then Include them. With a little pre-planning you can then just Swap the new ZWave devices into their old slots in your automations. On paper it's not too bad, the reality can be a big step though because devices might not be convenient to do the clicking needed to get them into Exclude or Include. (I'm thinking of ladders, etc.)
On to Zigbee... the Zigbee radio does not have the feature needed to read out the radio's configuration. As a result, you have to 'touch' each Zigbee device to get it work with the new Hub. But that's the whole step.. Include each and they drop right back into their slots.
Those two things don't have anything to do with the other.
It is fairly "normal" to not have the old hub active and transfer the devices. You must do a Z-wave Exclude on the old device with the new hub, which decouples it from the old hub.
With your new C7 you can run a network wide exclusion (settings/zwave details/zwave exclude button) that will exclude any zwave device that you initiate the exclude process on.
But even easier (and preferred), if you initiate a factory reset on all your zwave devices that you have, it will erase any inclusion status in the devices.
Add on note; if you have any Devices that use S0 security, you may find the C7 doesn’t like them. The general recommendation is to use No security for all devices except locks and garage doors even if the devices support S2.
I've had a number of devices that I've done a factory reset on with it still considering itself included. Doing an exclusion before pairing a device, even a brand new one, is best practice.
Back to the OP...there's documentation about building a solid mesh...link below. The cliff notes are, start with your mains powered devices first. Start with the closest devices to the hub and move outward. Repeat for your battery powered devices. After pairing each device, check it's status in the Z-wave Details page and be sure the route column is populated. Get any blanks, and you have a ghost. You should address any before moving on to the next device.
In advance on my new buddy arriving, I was hoping some of you who have trained your very own C7 could shed some light on the proper upbringing of my new little guy.
