Preparing for disaster with a HassOS RPI4

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I want to have a spare SD card with HassOS and Hassio setup, in case the one I have fails, so that all I have to do is swap the SD card then have HassIO up and running then restore from a more recent snapshot. I don’t remember if I used the 32bit or 64bit HassOS img when I first installed HassOS. Is it important for me to use the same HassOS version or can I use whichever I want to and still restore from a snapshot if it was on a different version HassOS? I want to use the 64bit version even though I might have used the 32bit version originally.

If not, what is the best way to find out which HassOS version I used to install with? Can I find out without putting the SD card in a reader on another machine?

Thirdly, should I be able to copy and paste my HassIO supervisor files from the old card to the new card if the new card is in a USB reader in my Ubuntu system and I have access to the HassIO supervisor through my network? When I try to paste into hassos-data>supervisor I don’t have the permissions. Can I change the permissions so that I can paste all of my supervisor folders and files and that way the spare is already setup like the original SD card?

2

I just realized one problem. I am unable to write to the spare SD card in the reader that is in the Ubuntu machine because of permissions only allowed by root. I found the following https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2211159 but I am unable to change the permissions because I get chown: cannot access '/media/user/… : No such file or directory

Is there a way around that problem?

3

Just put the SD card in a linux machine, use ‘dd’ to copy the existing image to the HDD. Then put the new SD in, and use dd to write the image back. No need to reinstall.

1 Like
4

or Win32DiskImager on Windows. I use this to do full SD-Card backups all the time.

1 Like
5

What if the original SD and the spare SD are two different sizes? The original is 16GB and the spare is 32GB. Can I use dd or Win32DiskImager on Windows and still be able to use the extra space or does they do an identical clone to where the extra space is unusable?

6

I found out that I can put the SD card into a Windows machine and open the USB drive then open config.txt and look for

# uncomment for aarch64 bit support
arm_64bit=1

or

# uncomment for aarch64 bit support
# arm_64bit=1

My original SD card has the latter and the the spare SD has the former which I know for a fact has the 64bit version of HassOS.

So I can’t do a clone if I want to move to a 64bit version. So now cloning is out of the question.

Is there a way I can write to the spare SD card in a Ubuntu machine or am I left trying to setup HA on the spare SD while in my RPI4 and then Samba and then copying a backup file to the spare SD and restoring from it?

7

Question is why do you want to migrate to 64bit version? This is not recommended for HassOS - some stuff won’t work which is why 32bit is recommended.
Otherwise, just back up config folder with yaml files etc.

8

I want to find out if there are things I already have that don’t work with 64bit. If everything works and it turns out to be faster and better with 64bit then I want to use it.

I was hoping to make the process easier by copying the config folder from one SD to another in Ubuntu. This way I could do it again from the spare to the original if I upgrade the original to 64bit.

9

I’d like to know what exactly did not work on 64bit when this part was written to the documentation.
Is there any information available?

10

Some addons are incompatible I believe. Never had that issue myself even though I did run the 64bit version a long time ago before switching to HA Supervised.

11

If the card is bigger, no problem
If the card has 1 less byte it will fail (different manufacturers use different byte layouts (less so now) but a ‘bad’ byte marker still counts as one less)