I got lucky in that the upgrade did not overwrite the .flows.json files or I would have really screwed. The old files were renamed to flows.json.backup or something like that so I was able to recover by importing them back into a new instance of nodered.
My backups didn’t work either. I set my backups to take one full and three incrementals weekly, and overwrite the oldest after the 4th backup, because space is tight. But when I upgraded to 16.0 and it failed, I tried to upgrade to 16.01, then.02 and so on, which backed up the older instance each time. This eventually overwrote the oldest 15.11 backup so I lost it.
@NathanCu being a fellow IT guy myself, I completely agree with you when you say backing up, and testing the backups regularly is important, because we know the consequences of what a failed backup could mean in a professionally managed environment. However, most of the these guys aren’t IT people, so they (including myself) have a certain degree a faith that if something goes wrong, we can simply restore the last known good configuration with a click of a button. As a somewhat poor analogy, when we drive our cars, we don’t do a complete checkup on the engine every time we go for a drive. We have to have some faith that it will get us to where we need to go. And in such a non-professional non-production “hobbyist” environment, that is the way it should be. Things should just work or at least have a way to recover easily if it doesn’t.
HOWEVER, and not to go too hard on Frenck (or whomever created the Nodered addon),publishing a flawed release of a software with such a disastrous consequence as causing a virtually bricked automation system that so many people have come to rely on is absolutely “unprofessional” (for the lack of lighter term).
Luckily there is a fix for this that will probably work for many people, but it could have much…MUCH worse and rendered MANY people without working automation, which many (including myself) have grown to depend on.
I may speak for myself when saying this, but please PLEASE double,triple…quadruple test your applications before releasing to the public. Many are not IT savvy nor do they know enough about JSON files or accessing the addon share to make changes, nor should they. I’d like to think that HA has evolved to the point where its ready for anyone who is interested in this stuff to adopt it, but after today, I am beginning to have my doubts, and all releases should come with a forewarning of potential damage.
