I got the following questions which are unanswered so far, even after searching for 40 minutes (also this is unanswered so far, so I’m copying those interesting questions here too):
What is it about?
This feature:
What are the open questions?
What data exactly will remain on the SD card (and therefore what will be outsourced) once the move data disk feature has been applied?
Docker containers (addons), which parts of the OS, what about the Supervisor etc. - as precisely as possible please. Assumption: I imagine HA OS data will stay on the SD card, everything else will be moved to the external data disk.
Can this be undone, so can data from an outsourced data disk be sourced back in (everything back on internal SD card)?
Or is this feature a one way road?
What happens once I would restore a full backup: will I need to have an external data disk attached for a successful restore or would it be possible to restore everything on the internal SD card only?
(partly related to question #2)
(not sure about HAOS Data Disk how to restore)
What’s my current setup (background of these questions)?
I’m running HA OS on a Pi 4 with 8 GB memory on a microSDXC Class 10 A2 sd card (SanDisk Extreme Pro) for over 3 years.
I tried to migrate to SSD boot several (okay, exactly two) times and all those attempts failed, supposedly because of a power issue (old SSD juicing too much power, power one Pi 4 USB 3 port can not provide). Today I’m kind of lucky I don’t run a SSD boot setup - because of all those update nightmares listed above.
Of course performance is a thing. The current bottleneck is definitely I/O and therefore the CPU load. CPU needs to wait quite a lot for the disk in heavy load situations (backups, reading a lot of LTS/statistics data etc.).
Of course I create backups regularly and store them also remotely (a backup on a corrupt storage disk is not worth much)
Recently my system gained a significant performance boost - a boost I still can not explain where it comes from - it still is a complete mystery:
What’s my target / motivation?
So I’m hoping to
a) preserve that stability of the “everything on the internal SD card” setup I’m used to for years while at the same time
b) improving performance (and storage capacity)
Of course adding another component basically does not add to target a) - what can fail, can fail. The NVMe itself, the controller of the NVMe-to-USB-C enclosure, the power supply of the enclosure/SSD etc. etc.
Therefore I plan to at first connect the external SSD and run some kind of benchmark, both in terms of performance as well as in reliability (let it read/write data for few hours and see if there are any hiccups) to estimate if there are any potential issues, before migrating the data.
I really need to answer those 3 questions before I’ll consider to use this feature at all. That’s mainly because the current setup runs very stable and reliable, something many users (maybe prejudices from the past or facts based on poor quality SD cards) say which is not possible.
What data exactly will remain on the SD card
Unless you start a fresh HAOS install to a specific disc (which seems to be your existing config…), only the user data partitions will be copied onto the new “data disk”. All HAOS, HASS, and code will remain as before.
For a worked example see this post with partition data.
Can this be undone
At the basic level, disconnect the “data disk” and reboot - the old data is still there, so without the newer version, it reverts.
Remember HAOS is an appliance, so to undo properly, backup, wipe, reinstall, restore.
What happens once I would restore a full backup
HAOS seems to work at arms length from HASS - HAOS sets up which physical partitions are mounted, and HASS restore restores multiple tar archives to the file system, regardless of the actual mount points.
Have I tested this with references to the HASS admin scripts in GitHub? Nope!
Basically, these are educated guesses from what mount looks like from HASS userland without developer shell access to the host HAOS.
I’d create a test rig, and do the things you are interested in to confirm what you need to know. A RPI3b+, two uSD, and one USB reader would be enough for this.
Have you tried this? When I did it, the CLI just said waiting for hassos-data
Would be useful if this was the case though, maybe a way of backing up to this old data disk and in case of failure of the new one, revert to it for redundancy.
I bumped on the same situation.
I actually don’t remember what keys I pressed (like Ctrl + Alt + F2, Ctrl + F1 and so on) but after some of them I got a usual login promt. I entered ‘root’ as login and it authorized me without any password.
Then I run ls /dev/disk/by-label/ and saw ‘hassos-data-old’ disk here. But HA requires ‘hassos-data’ disk, so I renamed ‘hassos-data-old’ to ‘hassos-data’ with the following command:
So the move data disk feature did not work for you? Would you provide some details on how you ran into this situation? I think for exactly those cases they leave the data on the internal storage, probably completely untouched next to changing the label.
But this way you did me/us a real favor: it seems like you answered questions 1 and 2 of
So it’s really „just“ the label of the partition HA OS is using to mount the data disk… quite handy. I would have expected to use a UUID or something similar specific.
Anyway, wondering if it’s therefore possible (aiming at answering initial question 3) to copy the data partition from an external disk back to internal storage. Probably with some steps like
make sure target partition/storage (internal) is of same size or larger as the source (external)
copying over with some dd magic
rename the partition as shown in the previous post
restart HA OS
Does that make sense? Unfortunately I (still) don’t have a spare/testing system to answer this on my own.
“The situation” in my case was the same as in @Morphy last reply.
I successfully moved data disk to new virtual disk on my ProxMox env. Then I realize, that I can just increase the size of “old” data disk, so, actually, I don’t need a new one.
I do the same as @Morphy: detach “new data disk” and run machine. And got the same message said “waiting for hassos-data”. That’s what I meant.
I ask google how to Undo move data disk and it leads me to this page. So after I found the solution I decided to post it here, in case some one will search the same solution.
And IMO, yes, HA uses disk labels to resolve some of its disks (I saw at least three disks with labels prefixed “hassos”).
Anyway, wondering if it’s therefore possible (aiming at answering initial question 3) to copy the data partition from an external disk back to internal storage.
this post!