I have HA running on an RPI. Everything has been running perfectly for months. I even used HA this morning. Suddenly, I can no longer access Home Assistant locally or using Nubu Casa. I rebooted the Pi a few times, changed the CAT5 cable connecting it to the switch, and changed switch ports, all to no avail. On the switch, I see normal activity lights. However, on the Pi, the green and yellow lights are solid. I can’t ping the Pi or anything. I did update HA and HA core last night, but everything was working fine after the update and this morning. Now I can’t get to anything. Any ideas or steps to take to try and recover from whatever happened?
Connect a keyboard and monitor to it and reboot. That should give you some idea where the failure is.
Start planning an image restore. Assuming you’re running on an SD card, that’s a likely candidate.
After watching the boot process, it looks like the card is the issue. Its giving me a read/write error and then tells me that it can’t reach the Docker Daemon. I’m assuming this is a micro SD card issue. Now, the question is how do I recover a backup off the CD card and restore to a new CD card?
Put the SD Card into a Linux PC or a Windows PC running Disk Internals Linux Reader (free).
Cross your fingers and hope the backups are not corrupted.
In future you should implement one of these solutions to regularly make and copy backups off the SD card automatically:
https://www.home-assistant.io/common-tasks/os#copying-your-backups-to-another-location
That’s easy: get a new SD card, flash the latest HA OS image to it (with Balena etcher or similar tools)
Then boot your RPi from the new card and when the HA onboarding starts in the Webbrowser you have the option to instead restore from the backup you have hopefully copied to some other machine before your SD card became corrupt. Edit: just realizing you have not 
then hope the backup-file is not corrupt. (Rule #1: To have a backup you MUST download the backup-file to another machine. Otherwise don’t consider it a backup…)
My advice: You should also think about getting an SSD in a USB enclosure instead of SD. Maybe now is the time. (You have to setup your RPi bios to boot from USB before you can do that)
Unfortunately it does not look like it:
Yeah, just realizing and edited my post.
Hopefully the file can still be retrieved from the corrupted SD card…
I actually did save a backup from October to my laptop. Thanks yall working on the new SD card now.
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Once you get up and running again, don’t overlook this advice:
Ok guys, I got the new card set up and HA started up. I am trying to restore from my backup, but the Supervisor tab on the left menu is not there. How do I get it back or is there another way to restore from a backup?
Glad you found the cause of the problem. And good advice about external backups.
Which brings me to a Feature Request I submitted last year (hard to believe it’s been that long!)
To me, it seems we’re setting users up for failure by saving the backups on the local device. The ideal would be to create the backups on an external storage device.
The options linked above simply copy the backup once it’s been created. Creating the backup on an SD card shortens its life.
I think an even more important point is that a system like HA which permanently writes to the file-system should not be run on an SD card. While it’s tempting to use a Raspberry Pi with an SD everyone who plans to seriously operate HA should at least use a USB connected storage device or some NUC like mini-PC.
I started HA on a Pi 3+, switched to a Pi 4 (both with SSD on USB) and a few weeks ago I switched again, this time to an HP Prodesk G3 Mini with a i5-7500T CPU and m.2 SSD.
This feels so much more responsive and much snappier than the Pi. (Although the Pi 4 definitely runs the system quite well)
I think it’s nothing wrong with additionally storing the backups on the HA server but IMHO the default should be to download the backup to a safe place as soon as it’s finished.
That whould prevent users from forgetting or not thinking of downloading the backup.
I got most things back up and running, but I’m having trouble getting HACS installed again. I was able to get it installed once, then it said HACS was “not loaded” I deleted it per a thread on the forum, but now it will not reinstall again. I see HACS available in integrations, but when I click to install, the box that pops up that contains the agreement check boxes is blank. Only the check boxes are visible. I click the check boxes and hit submit, and the install just spins and never moves on.