Hi there,
I have HAOS running on an RPi with an external SSD. It’s been running for about 4 years. All is well. However, I want to be prepared to recover if something gets corrupted or the SSD craps out. I make regular backups and store them on google drive. I have lots of z-wave devices and I regularly use z-wave JS to backup my controller as well.
I would like to use a spare SSD to:
-Install HAOS
-Plug in my current controller USB stick
-Restore from the latest HA backup
I’d like to make sure I understand the recovery process so that if I need to do it, I’ll have some experience.
Would this dry run actually result in a functional HA? And, could I go back to my original SSD without having created any problems? Obviously, the last thing I want to do it to break something while trying to test the recovery from something that broke :).
Should work. Personally, I have a virtualbox HA OS instance that I start up one a month to test the backups.
Note: if you use your dongle with a serial path as /dev/serial/by-id/… then your dongle will be found without problems. If you use /dev/ttyUSBx , you might have to adjust the path on the restored image.
Testing in a VM is an interesting idea. I believe I have VMWare Fusion on my iMac. Maybe I should try this approach. Do you use z-wave? If so, are you able to plug in your dongle and get all that to work?
It turns out I don’t have Fusion so I installed virtualbox on my Mac. I managed to get HA installed in a VM and restore one of my backups. I didn’t try to get it fully running by plugging in my z-wave dongle though.
It’s a good thing I did this because, believe it or not, I had not saved the encryption key for the backups. Had I not figured this out, I would have been kinda screwed if I had an actual failure.
One question:
I ended up shutting down my raspberry pi while I was testing the VM HA. I did this thinking that having two instances of HA running might “confuse” the non-zwave devices on my network (I didn’t have my zwave controller installed or I would have been worried about them too :)). Did I have to be worried about this? It would be nice not to shut down HA when I want to test backups.
I don’t shut down my other HA instances when testing the backups, most devices don’t have a problem connecting to more then 1 HA. Except those that need exclusive access to e.g. a dongle.