I have reinstalled the entire operating system on my raspberry pi 4 repeatedly now on account of the fact that it refuses to work for more than a few days before completely crashing and if I ever restart it it refuses to come back up. I have been restoring images repeatedly because this keeps happening. I’ve tried three different SD cards. How do I install it to a external hard drive so that this nonsense does not happen
It sounds as if the problem is not the pi or HA.
Have you tried replacing the power supply?
Maybe the poor thing doesn’t get enough food…
Running and maintaining HA on four pi 4s with no issues. I did have an issue of disk usage on one, and that could match your description, but I fixed that by reducing what was logged in the config and how much history was stored.
I also run Raspbian with HA in docker/docker-compose and this has saved me from many headaches. Takes a bit of time to get going, but if you are in for the long haul, I strongly reccomend it.
Also check your SD card. Sometimes part of the card are corrupt and if after some time f.ex. the database reaches those areas …
I have an official rpi psu. How do I boot it from an external ssd or hdd?
Also how do I install it in raspbian? And does that work for the new raspberry pi os thing?
I used this guide to use a usb SSD on an rpi4; https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/boot-raspberry-pi-4-usb. That said this still seems like more of a power issue, standard plug or not maybe it still has an issue?
I have made a docker-compose set-up here:
https://github.com/TomTorger/ha/tree/master/_repos/docker
There is a text file with commands for installing docker etc.
You should look into doker/docker-compose if you go this way though. Kode Kloud has a very good free course:
I also run Raspbian with HA in docker/docker-compose and this has saved me from many headaches. Takes a bit of time to get going, but if you are in for the long haul, I strongly reccomend it.
Dunno about that. I ran into several problems when in docker mode. A crashing supervisor for one, but the biggest problem I had was with Ikea lights. Running in docker mode made this very unreliable.
It’a a shame that running in docker mode does not reveice some more love from the devs…
Hmm… I am running deconz in a separate container and the ikea lights work like charm. Never had an issue with the supervisor crashing. I’ve had some weird issues with the rpi overheating. Suddenly the deconz container and Raspbian itself crashed, while home assistant was still running… Go figure.
Ordered a few new heat sinks 
I’m not running deconz, but using Ikea’s hub. I admit that that hub is a piece of crap, but when running in docker mode, Tradfri would often refuse to work in HA while the lamps still worked fine in the Ikea app itself, so it was not caused by the hub.
So what up is used when running in docker? The host machine?