Migrating to HA Yellow

I received my HA Yellow yesterday, and am getting ready to set everything up this weekend. Currently, I’m running HA on an old Raspberry Pi 3. All of my zwave and signee devices are connected to a Hubitat hub (leftover from my previous setup), and that is connected to HA via the plugin.

My question is whether it’s possible (and worth it) to migrate anything from my current installation over to the HA Yellow, or if I’m better off just setting everything up from scratch. That would obviously be more work, but not the end of the world. I want to do whatever will leave me with the best setup in the end.

Try a migration - you can always (backup then…) factory reset and start again.

If this helps, :heart: this post!

I finally found time to migrate from my RPI 4 to my new yellow.

  • Installed HA from USB Stick, created account and updated to HASSOS 10.1
  • Reset yellow to clean state (press red button when powering up).
  • Waited for onboarding screen and uploaded full backup from old system.
  • After upload is complete I get restore screen and select full restore
  • Wait…
  • While waiting I try to connect to box using ssh, which succeeds after some time

My full backup is 1.8Gb and I assume it will take a while to load, does anyone has some reference times for a full restore?

Is there a way to check if the backup is complete?
Does HASSOS has a cmd that would give information about the restore progress?

I have not yet managed to restore my full backup to the yellow, will try again :upside_down_face:

I have seen a few posts on this forum about large backups taking many hours, or failing to restore (search the forum).

My own experience was some versions ago with a restore failing due to media files (music). Unpacking, removing the media, and repacking the backup (just a collection of tar gzip archives - rename as *.tgz) fixed the restore.

My suspicion is a database restore of large amounts of sensor data causes both time and reliability issues. I deliberately only use the standard HASS database so don’t know much more to help.

To check progress, you’d likely need a shell (web or SSH - top or df -h) or access to the System tab (e.g. CPU / memory usage).

As I have a NVMe disc installed in my yellow I will switch data disc before next restore test. Wondering if the move survives a factory reset on the yellow.

edit: just did a factory reset and data disc is still configured correctly

will try backup restore during weekend, as I need to shutdown my life system

Finally managed to migrate to my yellow box. Caveats discovered

  • After reseting the yellow I ended up with a dev version of the supervisor so I reinstalled from usb stick. See yellow faq for guidance
  • created full backup without compression using Home Assistant Supervisor: Create a full backup in Developer Tools
  • waited for download to be available and downloaded it to local computer
    – backup compressed: 1.8Gb
    – backup uncompressed: 4 Gb
  • did initially minimal on boarding on yellow and updated HASSOS to 10.2
  • uploaded uncompressed tar backup
  • full restore of backup
  • wait…
  • use Terminal to check connectivity and after the ssh add-on is running again I could monitor progress using
    ha supervisor logs
  • waited until it shows backup completed
  • reboot host
    ha host reboot

After backup restore was completed the add-ons were not running, might be related that my other system was still online. After shutdown of old system and restarting host everything came up fine.

No issues with Mosquito (MQTT) and the WeatherflowToMQTT add-on regarding IP change.
I don’t have any Zigbee devices so can’t report on those.

System happily running on POE powered yellow :slightly_smiling_face:

Im just restoring mine now fot the first time which it has taken me 9 months to even get a yellow light flashing on it!

It has me to restore before I had even step foot into it so I hope I made the right chosse on this?

Its taken so far up to a hour which I was not expecting it to take this long but I also did not install onto a SSD as with all the issues I was just tryign to get it to work so thi salso may give me issues I wont know yet!

I’m just hoping it all goes well first time, but I will then be having to do it all again when I find out whay type of ssd I will be needing as the one I had spare I dont think its cmpatible or it might be but need to learn how to do all thi sfirst again which I not looking forward too again with it to be honest its been a nightmare to get Yellow to work

Im also not sure what its restoring too if I have no ssd in it?

mines taken a hour so far so I hope I don’t have the same issues. Its drove me silly buying this yellow nothing but frustrations like yourself!

How long do you think I shoud give it? I want to go to bed and might have to leave it at all night.

Depends on the size of your backup - if you have lots of /media files and use custom databases it could take days.

My last restore didn’t take very long (hour?) after all the work to optimise the standard supported database, and removing everything from /media (a mount from a NAS is better than direct storage).

Login and have a look at the logs - one of the other possibility is a bad storage device. The errors are often continuous as Linux tries reading/ writing, failing, and retrying.

If you’ve had lots of issues, open a new thread and we’ll take a look…