I’m running HA on a Home Assistant Green and I depend on it a LOT. I’m slightly worried because it is a single point of failure, running 24x7, and it could be pretty serious if it died. They’re not expensive (at least compared to all of the rest of the smart home stuff they’re connected to, or to the cost/inconvenience if it stopped working), so I thought I’d get a second to keep around as a cold spare.
My dream is that I could just periodically back up my HA-Green (and store the backup on a different device) and then if the HA-G died, I could simply swap in the new one and restore from the backup. Would it really be that simple? For example:
Would doing this re-install any integrations I have added?
Would doing this re-install things installed via HACS?
I have a large Z-wave network. If I just move the USB dongle to the new HA-G, will this seamlessly transfer over all of my Z-wave devices/automations/etc.?
I also got paranoid about a cold spare and had a completely identical rPi 4B 8GB sitting next to my HA rPi for just this reason. I moved to VMWare and haven’t worried about it since its a snap to clone the VM. That being said, I had two times where I needed to fire the cold spare when I was having ethernet issues and it was pretty much plug-and-play.
@CO_4X4 , I’ve bought the spare HA-Green but haven’t done anything with it. (I’m weighing the benefit of testing it against the risks of upsetting something that’s working well now )
I would test it now. I would not want to be in a situation where I had a failure and discovered I could not recover quickly. The worst time to discover your backup plans don’t work is when you need them to work.
Yeah I understand that but I’m going along the same thought process as Mark but I have mine doing things like controlling lights to my chickens so mine might be a little more critical. I’m getting and identical odroid to mine any day now and hope to start testing soon. I’m wondering if just cloning the emmc might be easier then using back ups. I’ll do my best to update you with my results.
Yes. Actually, I remove my production / live SD card (after shutting down my host system of course), clone it using Win32Disk, then insert the cloned disk into my system and boot. So, the clone is now the production SD. I do this once a month, and rotate through a set of 4 SD cards.
I believe I’m going to try something similar now that I have heard its been done, only negative is taking the system down to do it so I will make backups between clones just in case. Thanks Mark.
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