I found this thread pointing out that hass.io has a migration tool.
Community Hass.io Add-on: Lovelace Migration
Is there an easy way migrate a hassbian install?
On a side note, I am new to HA, will I regret starting with hassbian? I am getting concerned that at some point the hass.io version may the the only one maintained.
Hi @smart, the add-on is actually based on a Python script, which can easily be run on Hassbian:
To answer your side question, I personally prefer Hass.io because of the simple extensibility of add-ons. There are so many add-on repositories, but really the official and community (both come with fresh install of Hass.io) should have almost everything you need.
Thanks, I wanted more control and several of my devices don’t work under Hass.io from my research so I went with hassbian. Technically you didn’t answer my side question. You just responded to it 
My question was really a concern that some day hassbian will not be supported. I suspect it will be some time before that happens and hopefully there will be an upgrade path at that point.
I have been finding it relatively easy to move to lovelace. I am just building it up slowly and using old UI until I have it all set up. A migration would have been nice but I am not minding doing it by hand so far.