I thought its a good idea to challenge the backup/recover mechanism before releasing my HA / Matter setup to the public. Well - this idea was not good.
My HA is runnning on an Intel NUC and connected via network cable. It has a fixed IPv4 adress and I installed a few Matter WiFi devices, which were working perfectly fine. Then I made a backup, safed the file and reinstalled HA from scratch - just to make sure I have a confirmed to be working procedure in case the system breaks. So I downloaded the latest image, booted my NUC with Ubuntu and installed the image. After forst start of the system it offered me to provide a backup file to recover the settings - which I did.
First I figured out that the matter server caused an internal failure because it accessed the Wifi Interface, which was not used or configured. For the next trial I put the system in a perfect environment, configured both Wifi and Ethernet, installed a Matter device etc. etc. After reinstallation I still had errors in the log files but even worse: HA had forgotten the Matter devices. All of them - and they are now inside enclusures, where I have no easy access to the device any more. Re-commissioning is no issue - but I haven’t found a trick yet to recover my device.
Does anybody know a method to run a “HA recover” without having to re-add all devices? Would fixed IPv6 addresses help? Is there any possibility to “safe and restore” the fabric?
Thanks for your help and feedback
Klaus