Hello everyone, this is my first post here.
I have Home Assistant 2026.8.2 installed on a Raspberry Pi 3B.
Yesterday I got the idea to install HACS—which was a bad idea—because now I can only access Home Assistant via the command line, and I have NO idea which commands to enter there.
Being the overconfident fool that I am, I did NOT make any backups when I performed the various installations.
So now I’m hoping you have some good advice or links so that the system can get back up and running.
What should I do?
Pi3 is not recommended and not powerful enough to run HA for a while now, because of too small RAM. You need at least 2GB (4 even better).
Yeah, i guess you could run HA on Pi3 with 1GB, but only HA, not much more. By installing HACS you went over 1GB of ram…
Okay, then I’ll have to look for a PI4 at a good price if I’m going to start doing more with HA
For me, PI3 and HA were going great—until I messed things up.
Home Assistant will make a backup, if you didn’t disable that.
So if you could grab that backup file to some another computer, you could start from fresh and restore the backup.
Or you may have the sd card taken out from the pi, and mount that to a Linux System, and then take the backup files from there. If you want to start fresh with some backup.
Thanks for all the information.
I had forgotten that Node-RED and SAMBA were also installed; I’ve now uninstalled them, and the Pi 3 is using 60% of its RAM and 6% of its CPU.
I’ll probably upgrade to a Pi 4 if the price is right.
I haven’t had to restart anything in a while, so I think it’s stable right now.
For now, it feels like the “issue” is resolved.
Thanks for putting up with my rambling.
When you are at it, you should transfer your automatic backup to another computer.
And of course download the emergency kit.
So you don’t need to start from scratch next time the system crashes.
And you could also gain some memory if you read my prev message.
If you don’t need to connect the HDMI to some display/screen.
I’m also a RPi 3 B+ refugee. I feel your pain. That thing ran great. As you saw, single-digit CPU utilization. It was the memory demands of HA which killed it. Part of me wishes the devs had put more effort into generating lean, efficient code, but frankly that’s not the way things are done these days. So I moved on.
The price/performance numbers for the RPi just don’t make sense any more. It’s a shame. When it was new, the RPi was a breakthrough which made so much of what we take for granted today possible. Somewhere around COVID time, with all the supply chain disruptions, they went in a different direction, and they haven’t been competitive ever since. Almost every other option for running HA gives you better performance, a better price, or both.
patrikg
If I hadn’t had the monitor connected during this troubleshooting session, I wouldn’t have seen all the lines in the image I showed a little earlier, nor would I have noticed that they restarted on their own after a while.
CaptTom
That’s so true.
What do you think of an Intel NUC with 5 GB of RAM?
Any nuc (read: x64 minipc) readily available will out perform the Pi. That should be fine and light years faster than that pi3, 4, and most will outperform pi5.
My first HA instance was a Rpi 3b I bought in 2017 and installed HA on it around 2020. At some point I moved to a pi 4, and now a NUC. But I’m still using my Raspberry Pi machines. They both run Z-Wave JS which (for one) allows me to run a zwave mesh too far for my in-house mesh, and the other is just my main home Z-Wave JS instance.
I stopped using HACS while I was still running the RPi, and never looked back. The manual installs are not really a whole lot harder, and I don’t mind being a bit “hands on” with my installation.
