How usable and reliable is HA for you?

Your questions:

Do not logout on page reload.

How to control a socket with multiple switches?.

Zigbee button vs switch? Convert button to switch?.

Zigbee button and tasmota socket integration misbehaving.

Perhaps someone can help. :grin:

Well I have no IT knowledge, no other home automation system but Iā€™ve learned how to use Home Assistant by playing with it set up in a virtual machine on my laptop, when I was ready to go to production phase I moved HA to a dedicated machine.

For the past three years my HA is rock solid, it is so solid and realible that for the past two years itā€™s my main HAVC control system (I do have a backup analog control but never had to use it). I use 48 integrations, 16 add ons, over 100 automations and it works without any problems.

As far as updating I do it once a month, then I update all my hacs integrations, add ons and HA itself. Before I update I read realise notes and note every problem I might have, then scan through the forum to see if there is a bigger problem with the realise. After an update I just see if everything works. At first I would take me some time to go through all this, but now that I know what to look for all this takes me about 30 min. to 1 hour.

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Not sure it would help You to know how frequent , beside i have 3 kinds of backup ā€œproceduresā€
Every YAML file, including add-on setting, automations etc, i manually copy, so even the Dashboards, ( Yaml in Raw-editor ) so i always have these to i.e make ā€œofflineā€ editing in/from. , beside the ā€œautomaticā€ backup before updating, and ā€œfullā€ backup on occasional basic(from UI).
And as im running HA-OS in vmware, i copy the whole vmware-folder , about every 2 nd month (usually prior to ā€œmajor/specificā€ updates)(vmware and HA is running on separate m.2 nvme)
I only keep 3 of these, 3 ā€œfullā€ and 3 month of ā€œnormalā€ autobackups.
Some YALM-files like cards/dashboards/automation/templates etc basically still have from day 1(multiple versions)
So no i have not any ā€œexternal schedulesā€ or ā€œrunning proceduresā€, i donā€™t find any reasons to load a backup i.e daily/nightly, and so i have never had any issues related to/or caused by backup :wink: , obviously

My backups happen every time any time a file changes in HA. I use an offsite backup service for that very reason. Every time I make a change to something in YAML (or the .config files), a backup of that file gets stored and versioned. Makes restores SUPER easy.

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Then Home Assistant Developer Documentation and Integration Architecture will be familiar to you.

This is always a good idea regardless of the software being used. And I always test my backups to make sure they will work for recovery because I can never predict when I will need them.

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So, it is clear from your history (using for months, joined four days ago) that you have not come here for help, but to just complain.

I am not sure your P.S. is genuine from your replies to responses to your ā€˜clearlyā€™ attacking post.

Being a developer and admin for 35 years, I find HA very useable and reliable.

Would I recommend it to my mechanical engineer, bus driving, waitress, etc relative? Hell no. I push them to OTS systems with support.

This just made me giggle. Especially with your ā€˜backgroundā€™.

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Might be worth doing a fresh install on new hardware to see if itā€™s more stable. What youā€™re describing is not typical.

Hey, Billā€¦ would you mind to explain how do you do that? I miss exactly that - making a backup of each yaml, dashboardā€¦ when i ā€œmessā€ with it. I make nightly backups, but many times itā€™s not enough.

Being a developer and admin for 35 years, I find HA very useable and reliable.

And you are giggling when someone finds making a backup before absolutelly every change operation an indicator of reliability issues. Not sure on what systems you work, but the ones I work on do not require userā€™s backups before every change operation.

For me HA has been rock solid for years, and Iā€™m not the only one :slight_smile: You have to put in the work to understand what is going on. If you face issues. Solve them yourself. Especially if you have IT knowledge. When you get more and more familiair with it, it becomes addictive and extremely fun to work with.

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HA is as reliable as the hardware you buy. If you buy e.g. Tuya Wi-Fi stuff, donā€™t be surprised if it is unreliable. But if you do your homework before buying, you will have nothing to complain about.

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For me, It runs my entire house, etcā€¦ I imagine itā€™s the same for all the folks who commented on this post.

I find it an odd question to inquire to a community this large, especially when you consider the effort made to assist new users. Most are dedicating their time for free.

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Iā€™ve been using HA for quite some time now and I find it very usable and reliable. I donā€™t think Iā€™ve ever had downtime that was cause by software issues. I run pretty much the whole house on it. I do regular backups and when I update to major versions I do a hypervisor snapshot first so that a rollback can be done in seconds.

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I get your points :slight_smile: Iā€™ve been working in IT for 20 years before I started with HA, and while Iā€™m overall super happy with how far I made it so far, the path there was and is quite rocky from time to time.

The documentation is confusing in certain areas, it took me a while to find the right ā€œtone of voiceā€ to feel accepted in the community/forum (something I wasnā€™t used to from all kind of other online communities/forums), and while the overall aspirations of HA/NabuCasa sound like moving more and more into a widely used solution direction, I would still to this very day not install an HA instance for someone who doesnt have at least some kind of background in IT as well.

To answer your main question: by now my instance is very usable, and mostly reliable, but I on purpose donā€™t have usecases where I would get into trouble if HA suddenly didnt work anymore as before.

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HA is quirky and odd at times, but it is partly due to the fact that it is controlling stuff that was not meant to be controlled by the vendors and it is partly due to the way HA evolves, which is fast and ever-learning, so you have old code doing it in one way and new code, that do it in another way, because the developers have gotten wiser by the old code.
The learning curve is steep and one thing that is probably not expressed clearly enough in the documentation is that the real goldmine to info on HA is this forum. The forum access is pretty much a must-have to master HA in any way.

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Iā€™ve been using HA since August 14 2017. It does everything that I need it to do. HA is rock solid. Thanks to people who develop Home Assistant.

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You should try to use commercial proprietary traditional systems like AMX or Crestron and youā€™ll really enjoy HA after that :smiley: Itā€™s so more efficient, designed for modern devices, easy to use and maintain and even if there is none commercial support, forums and communities are most of time lot more efficient, not even speaking fact that when you have a problem you can find multiple solutions not like proprietary ones where you are fucked up if itā€™s a bug of the systemā€¦
After working more than 20 years with these proprietary systems, Iā€™ll never come back to them since I use HA since quite few years now !

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I use CrashPlan Pro in a docker container. It monitors my external /srv/homeassistant/ (also as a docker container) directory and monitors for file changes. Unlimited, offsite storage and not too expensive. I even backup my Frigate recordings nightly.

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Damn right I am giggling. Not backing up is stupid!

That is from those years of experience.

I have had to restore once on HA. Not due to HA updates or anything. But, due to not taking a copy/paste to Notepad++ before messing up one of my automations.

Donā€™t read ā€˜backing up early and oftenā€™ as an HA issue. It is just smart!

Backing up config etcā€¦ before each change is not because of possible HA unreliability, but purely as a prevention against programmerā€™s fault. Itā€™s quite easy to mess up a working system, while sometimes itā€™s not so easy to revert it back.
Also, sometimes you try to ā€œimproveā€ something which ends up as a big mess (=youā€™re not happy with the result) and you just want to go back to a previous state quickly. THATā€™S why thereā€™s a backup before each changeā€¦ :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: and in this case iā€™m talking about yaml backup, not whole system oneā€¦

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