Migration to new hardware

Installation
1

So after a hdd failure I have decided to migrate my docker HA install to some other hardware. I thought this would be straight forward but things are not what I expected. Since I am utilizing docker I am aware that there is no restore feature for backups. So I thought I would simply extract the configuration directory from the backup of HA I have and copy these files to my new docker configuration folder. This is where the problems have begun. Firstly I had to deal with permissions issues between my old system and my new one. Now I have noticed that it doesn’t look like the new system is actually using the configuration.yaml file that was part of my “restore” process. Other things that definitely don’t look right

  • none of my original dashboards show up
  • none of my helpers have migrated
  • none of my hacs installs have migrated

If anyone has a procedure to migrate my existing backups to a new system please provide details. I currently have access to both my original and new system so that should help. As mentioned the original and new systems are both utilizing the docker installation.

Thanks

2

Need more detail - what kind of HA install (Supervised?), whaty kind of a backup how did you back it up? Also the exact old and new hardware, etc. etc.

3

As explained HA is a docker container install. It is on an x86 i7 platform with a Debian host os. The backups were done with the built in backup function in HA. Since it is docker container I also have access to the docker container HA configuration volume. The new system is also docker on an x86 based platform.

4

Copying the old configuration files over to the new should do it, but remember to copy the hidden files and directories too.

5

I create a system user for HA and use PUID and PGID to set the for my docker container. Really I do this for all my containers. This reduces a lot of the permission issues I experienced when migrating to new system.

For docker you only need the config folder(with hidden files). If it doesn’t just work there are only a few possibilities
-you moved to difference version of HA. I specify
Version tag, :2024.5.1 for example.

-you missed something. Make sure you get the hidden folders.

-file permission issue. You say you check this so maybe they are not what you expect. Start a HA container with mounted config folder. Leave the folder empty and allow HA to put default files. Compare permission you set with permissions of files created.

Last tip. Macvlan is better than host networking in my opinion. HA will get its own IP and mdns works

6

Thanks for this, I will investigate further and try to see what is going on. I am suspecting I may still be dealing with permission issues too so I am going to re-create the new system and validate permission issues like you suggested. Good weekend work for me.

7

I would generally just copy the config folder. You already need to move copy from system A to system B. It will like be better result. Rsync over ssh should retain system A permission but you will need to make them match on system b.

8

So after doing some testing I pointed my docker stack to the directory that I extracted the backup into as a volume. To my surprise the HA app came up with all the configuration I expected so definitely something regarding how I was copying the backup. I am confident I have a good backup and I just need to work out a formal restoration procedure. Thanks for all the ideas. I will document my restoration process once I have it finalized.