Moving to a new Raspberry PI

[iamgrog68]

This may be a stupid question, mine normally are, so I appologise in advance.

I have Hassio on a Pi3 and it’s been working fine for a few years, last night the red light started flashing and HA was not accessable. I figured it was to do with the power, plugged a firestick power lead in and back up and running, left it half an hour and then plugged the original power lead back in and all was good. This has made me wonder if it’s time to upgrade to a Pi4 or 5?

If I do, what is the process of transferring my current setup to the new PI?

1. can I just put my existing SD card in the new PI and off it goes Hassio boots up and all as was?
2. do i need to do a backup of my existing, install a fresh hass.io on new PI and then restore the back up from old one?
3. because new PI’s have different processors etc, do I need to set everything up from scratch again?

or is there another way I have not thought about?

[francisp (Francis)]

@iamgrog68

can I just put my existing SD card in the new PI and off it goes Hassio boots up and all as was?

No

@iamgrog68

do i need to do a backup of my existing, install a fresh hass.io on new PI and then restore the back up from old one?

Correct. There are separate images for pi3, pi4 and pi5

@iamgrog68

because new PI’s have different processors etc, do I need to set everything up from scratch again?

No, restore your backup and you are fine.

And , hassio is already 4 years dead. It is called Home Assistant OS now, or HA OS in short.

[Arh]

Best to find out why it is failing first. Most probably the SD card failing which will not be solved if you put it in a pi4.

If you are buying a new pi4, don’t bother go for something like a second hand NUC or thin client. More power for less or similar cash, and less issues with power and sd cards. plenty of guides on youtube.

[Edwin_D]

Downside to NUC or thin client is much higher power consumption, so higher running cost. So if you need the power go for NUC. If you don’t and cost is a factor, then decide knowing it may look the same price but it isn’t the same long term.

[CaptTom (Tom)]

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought one advantage to the RPi line is that there are “canned” HA installations available. In other words, no messing with setting up the OS, then layering HA on top of that. Obviously some would see that as a disadvantage, but I figured it was worth noting.

[Arh]

HAOS runs on NUC or x86 based hardware.

The power consumption may be higher but by the time you add ssd drives and powered hubs to a pi, (needed for reliability) you are probably not talking a lot. and the advantage is in a years time when you inevitably want a more powerful system, you will have one.

[MaxK (Mark)]

Agree you should troubleshoot your crashes first. Why spend extra money and time for a new platform if you don’t have too?

How to Troubleshoot Raspberry Pi Crashing

Ensure you are using an appropriate power supply. See the warning at the top of this page: USB peripherals directly attached to the Pi can exceed the power supply limits (for example SSDs and Disk drives). Always attach these to a separately powered USB hub then attach the USB hub to the Pi. Try a different power supply (power supplies can fail). The SD card, SSD, etc. may have corrupt files from a crash, power fail, repeated power cycles without proper shutdown, etc. Try a clean in…

And your SD card may be ok but the files on it might be corrupted from the crash.

SD Card Reliability

There are recommendations on this forum and elsewhere to avoid using SD cards because they are not reliable (e.g., they wear out). Device manufacturers typically measure reliability, under ideal conditions, as meantime between failure (MTBF) for harddisks or the total number of write operations for SDs and SSDs. They also compete on other metrics including speed, storage capacity, price, size, etc. so you can usually find this information if you search for it. SD cards may not be able to do as…

[iamgrog68]

Thanks for the replies. This is the first time it has happened, never had the red flashing light before, I am just preparing myself if it happens again, so looking at what is involved in ‘upgrading’

I must admit I don’t know what a NUC, I do have an old laptop with linux installed that’s not used and did think about installing on that but that does seem like a bit of an overkill for my simple setup, apart from the SD I don’t have any extra’s plugged into it.

[iamgrog68]

I know it’s been a few months since last posting in this thread but I changed the powerlead and that fixed the issue but I am now finding with recent HA updates the PI3 is struggling so I have got a PI 5 coming today. Hoping it’s as simple as installing HA on it and then restore a backup from my PI3, it’s been a few years since I set up the PI3 so hope I get it right lol

[Arh]

Yep should be that simple, the biggest issue will be the change of ip address. So if running something like an mqtt server you may need to re assign all the stuff that logs into Mqtt. This may well affect other addons as well. May be easier to set the ip address of the new pi to the same as the old one on your router, before installing HA.

[iamgrog68]

Thanks, once I’ve received the kit and put it together I will disconnect the Pi 3 and assign the IP address to the Pi 5.

[iamgrog68]

Apart from an issue when tried switching from eth to wlan, sorted and now working on my new pi5. so much faster than the old Pi3. Now can play and look for other add ons I don’t really need but look good LOL