After a couple of months of figuring things out I was finally having a ball with HA and everything was working perfectly. I’m running HAOS, Supervisor on a Macbook Pro in Virtual Box.
When initially setting up the VM I followed the HA official installation guide and downloaded the current OS from the Installation page. At the time it was haos_ova-8.5.vdi. I soent ages getting it to run smoothly but eventually it did. I upgraded to 9.0 and continued to build on my system. I kept daily snapshots of the VM and twice daily backups of HA which I downloaded to another drive for redundancy.
Yesterday, while not paying attention, I decided to clean up my Downloads folder by removing the .vdi files and others not realizing that the VM was reading the images from the Downloads folder. SO not like me to do something like this but…there you go.
So the VM could not find the image. I went back to the site and downloaded 8.5.vdi again and put it in the same location as the old one. Now the VM will not startup from scratch, however, when I restore my last snapshot it’s running perfectly like nothing happened.I am not sure if that’s ok or not. When I try start the VM up again from scratch I get all sorts of errors but then I restore the VM snapshot and it’s all good.
Then I decided that this does not seem right so I started from scratch and made a new VM, installed the 9.0vdi and HAOS started up perfectly. When I went to onboarding the page gave me the create an account dialogue with the option to restore from a backup. I chose to restore but when I tried to upload the backup I got an error message saying I was denied.
Now I’m at the point where I don’t know if it’s ok to keep working with my old VM and it’s snapshot and not worry about it starting up weird then trying to restore my last HA backup into that or try to get it working on the clean install VM. Basically at a standstill.
Any help or advice really appreciated. If I don’t reply immediately it’s because I’m working on a deadline and so I can only check this forum periodically.
I’m also on a MacBook Pro and Virtualbox. If your snapshot still works you must have a .vdi file somewhere. Click on your snapshot in the virtualbox GUI, click ‘Properties’, click ‘Information’ tab, it shows you the ‘Settings File Location’. That folder should contain a ‘snapshots’ folder full of .vdi files.
Thanks so much for the reply.
Yes the snapshot works but if I restart the VM for any reason, say once I have installed a new integration or add on and I need to restart, it does not restart properly. I get tons of errors and the HA Cli does not startup and it goes straight to the “login” cli and I cannot start HA.
So I started again with a fresh VM but cannot install my HA Backup. I cannot log into my original HA account either. It keeps asking me to make a new account or install from a backup but when I restore any backup it says I don’t have permissions or access.
I don’t really know much about Virtualbox I just muddle my way through, but one thing which has helped me before is right-clicking your working snapshot and create a new clone. On the next screen it asks if you want to create a linked or unlinked copy, choose unlinked. You should be able to boot the cloned VM, and delete the old snapshot. This has fixed weird VM problems for me in the past, it’s also a quick way to get rid of dozens of snapshots without spending hours deleting them all one by one. It unlinks you from the oldest snapshot, which might help fix your issue.
I ended up starting from scratch. It’s weird but it doesn’t seem as stable as my original install. Still, everything I’ve learnt over the past two months of tinkering has made it much easier and quicker to get a brand new install working and up to speed.