I’m running Home Assistant 0.114.1 on a Pi 4. I read about booting from USB drive and that makes sense. What I would like to do to save starting from scratch is to move my whole installation from the SD card to a USB drive. I’m starting to get some odd issues with the Pi and I’m wondering if the SD card is starting to get flaky.
If I do a new build onto a USB drive, can I then reload a snapshot? Or is there another way to do this?
From what I’ve gathered that’s the overall process: take a snapshot, install fresh instance, restore snapshot. However there are a couple of things worth mentioning.
Flash drives don’t serve as very good boot drives for very long, even compared to SD cards. You’d be best off using an external SSD or a USB3 to SATA adapter with a 2.5" SSD attached. But I reckon a healthy flash drive would work at least for the time being.
Second, I have been trying to do something similar but kept running into problems. Booting HA on a Pi isn’t quite the same as Raspberry Pi OS or ARM Linux distro. You have to use one of the new Home Assistant OS Release 5 64 bit images (here’s the latest), and it seems that some have been having some issues with U Boot.
My HA instance on my Pi 4 somehow corrupted while taking the last update and won’t boot at all, so since I have to start fresh anyway (and have an extra SSD sitting around) I’m about to try something very similar to what you’re asking. I’ll report back if I find anything else that might be useful for ya.
Nice one. Thanks for that. I think what I might do is get another Pi and a SSD and replicate the setup exactly. Mine is OK at the moment. But I’ve noticed that it starts to slow down after about a week or 10 days until it grinds to a halt and needs to be restarted. Then it takes longer than If expect to boot and is then fine again. I might even try rebuilding on a new SD card and reloading a snapshot to see if that actually is the problem.