My Beginner Questions

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,

I’m new to Home Assistant and I’m very impressed by all the possibilities.

I have started with a raspberry pi 4 (8gb) and it works great. After digging deeper into the topic I have some general questions and hope that some could answer them.

  1. Updates: in the last weeks I saw that nearly every week a new release was released. On the one hand it is great to see that the project is that active. On the other hand I’m asking myself if I need to go with every update or if I can run the system with the same patch for a year or so (only if everything works without issues) and can do the upgrade to the latest version after that time. Or are there issues upgrading from older versions to the latest one?
  2. Currently my installation is running on a sd card. It is an max endurance card. Are there real life experiences how long those cards will work?
    A backup strategy is in place.

If someone could answer those questions, it would be appreciated.

BR
Florian

2

  1. Read the release notes, if it does not impact you there is no urgency to update. Particularly with minor version bug fixes. Still, it takes less than 5 minutes so there’s no real reason not to. Do not fall behind on major monthly releases, or you may be in a world of hurt when you do update due to a large number of breaking changes.

  2. Up to years. Depends how hard you are thrashing the recorder database. There are topics and guides on minimising this.

3

For #1 as I am just getting back into Home Assistant I decides to use 2021.11.5 and wait for other to fond the bugs in 2021.12.x. :wink:

When starting out it is difficult to differentiate between newbie caused issues & real bugs.

2 Likes
4

I normally read the release notes, and if it looks like nothing will interfere with my current config, I update (after taking a full backup)

And since i run HA on a virtual machine, with every major release (or when I suspect issues), I first take a snapshot…

But i can advise:

  • do not use too many ‘custom’ add-ons, they might give issue with future updates.
  • make backup’s (and store in a safe place).
  • don’t wait too long with updates, as it might cause problems. I find it easier to solve a few minor issues at the time then 20 big time problems once a year :thinking:
1 Like
5

Hi, thanks for your answer. Really appreciated.

For 1. Thanks. Going for the latest and greatest is what I like as well. Just wanted to know some other opinions as sometimes it is wise to wait and check the forum to see if the version is stable :slight_smile:

For 2. I have read most of the threads about sd cards and the recommendation to move to ssd instead. I’ve also read the threads about optimizing the recorder for sd cards. But I haven’t read any real life examples how fast an sd card will be trashed in order to get a feeling about this.
Replacing the sd card every one or two years wouldn’t be an issue for me.

My installation is now running for a month or so, so I’m really at the beginning. At the moment I just implemented some logic’s around window covers using Shelly’s and Enocean enabled switches.
In the future I will also implement the automation of my Ike’s tradfri light bulbs.
My SMA photovoltaic solution is also configured on ha.
So from my point of view a real small installation for the moment.
But this tool really looks like something which can really grow within my home for the next years.
Thanks for making it.

BR
Florian

6

Well, I’m working the in tech industry and backup was the first thing I configured.
Every night I do a full backup using the samba backup addon to my DiskStation.
The DiskStation is doing backups to a second local DiskStation and to a cloud platform every night so this should rescue my data even in the worse case.

7

Ideally, if you can handle the downtime, you would backup with HA shut down so files are not changing during the backup.

At work, with “unlimited” storage, I like using rclone to move my backups to Dropbox cloud. It supports many other providers too.

i figured I might be more adventurous with versions once I am confident my configuration is pretty solid.

8

Well, the Synology backup, which I use, does versioning for all files, which now includes my ha backups as well.

1 Like
9

About 8 months. I have consistently lost a Class 1 SD in every Pi I’ve ever owned between 8-14 months. That’s how often. Your mileage may vary. THE SSD upgrade is EASY and th every first thing I did to my system. There was an instant startup speed boost as the SSD I put in was an order of magnitude faster than most SDs.

I also agree with Tom:

If you’re going to stick on an SD I HIGHLY advise you review the topics on reducing traffic on that DB.

2 Likes
10

Best way to avoid database all together, use a virtual one :wink::

recorder:
  db_url: 'sqlite:///:memory:'
11

If you’re doing that, just direct it to /dev/null They both have the same long term persistence but /dev/null is higher capacity. Less chance of filling it up :wink:

1 Like
12

Thanks for your reply. I’m currently just starting and if I see, that the SD Card will not work long enough I will switch to SSD.
At the moment I do not see any issues with performance, but this could come in the future, if I integrate more and more.

13

SD Card life can be extended by using sane commit intervals on the filesystem.

Sadly haos makes use of the default for ext4 which was from the hard disk era and doesn’t take flash storage into account. That default 5 second “flush” interval typically cause write amplification and will wear out flash much faster then necessary.

To work around this a supervised is needed so the commit interval (when ext4 is used) can be set to something like 10 minutes or choose directly a flash friendly file system (like f2f) so no tweaking is necessary.

HAOS could also change to use a tweaked commit interval to make ext4 fit for flash storage age or change to a flash friendly file system simply because most of the people use flash storage in 2022 :champagne:

1 Like