I’m moving in a few weeks, and my home assistant server and devices will be in storage for around six months while I sell my house and find a new one. I will be taking all my smart home devices with me - mostly z-wave, but also a few Zigbee and WiFi. I am looking for advice on what to do before taking the system down. For example, should I do an exclude on the Z-Wave devices before I move, or just leave everything as it is, label the devices, and fix it up when I bring things back online? I will definitely be backing up HA, and because it’s running in a VM in proxmoxx, backing up the VM and copying the backup file somewhere safe.
I don’t think I would exclude anything. I expect bringing it back online after the move will just be ‘old’ software that needs updated.
But, I have not done this. I may be totally wrong 
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I have. Basically just starts and runs.
Since it is new home Inwoukd consider any changes you may want to do. Depending on changes a “start from scratch” may be easier
Ultimately only thing needed for now is to move. If you are leaving Devices behind you should remove all private account details and factory reset as needed.
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I agree, just shut it down.
Now for start-up, however, if it is actually 6 months I would personally load a new VM at that point and start fresh. Updating 6 months is awful. You have the VM so you have the old accounts and automations and anything else you may want to carry over. However I would spool up a new copy to start, then add the stuff back for a long hibernation situation. If it ends up to be more like 2 or 3 months, then just use the original. 6 months or over, start over. (That is the deprecation timeout for big changes and generally makes the catch-up updates more frustrating)
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If I create a new VM, can I migrate over the device config? Z-wave devices are a pain to add off they were not excluded from the old server.
INNR bulbs can be extremely hard to re-pair. Something I learned the hard and frustrating way, that’s the only real issue I’ve ran into for trying to re-set a home back up.
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Do you need to preserve the collected historic data from the old premises?
Will plug and pray take care of recognising your old devices at the new premises?
Maybe go with a brand new install.
Strong suggestion: New passwords all around, just in case something lingers from the old.
Z-wave device configuration is stored on the controller, not the VM.
Sounds like a lack of understanding of how Z-wave works. Any controller can exclude a device from its previous Z-wave Network, you do not need the original controller.
In your case, since you aren’t erasing the Z-wave controller you should be fine. Personally I would label everything with their Z-wave Node Number, that’s all you really need to know.
Ok, thanks.
I think I’ll leave the existing setup as is, label everything, and see what the new house looks like when I get there. If it’s similar, it might be easier to just start with the old confih and make incremental changes. If not, I can start afresh.
Since the position of the Z-Wave controller in relation to the various devices (as well as the devices with each other) will be different in the new house, anticipate that things won’t be fast or efficient when you first set up. It will take some time for the mesh network to heal and optimize itself based on the new layout. That’s the only advantage I see for excluding now and then including again at the new house: the new mesh would be optimized from the start.
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individual “rebuild route” on each device starting from whats presumed to be closet to controller.
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