No idea what suddenly went south, but my install was running great and then suddenly it seemed to be dead. I have captured the last backup which is a few days old, but I am not sure where to even look to see what the cause might have been in order to prevent future issues. I’ve just formatted and re-installed HA on my SD card for the Pi 4/ 64 I’ve got here.
You should have looked at your log files before reinstalling. They’re gone now.
Keep an eye on system resources (cpu and ram), keep an eye on your system log.
I wasn’t able to get to the device … no response. Didn’t seem to be on the network either
You can still read the files directly from the SD card with a linux PC or a windows PC running Disk Internals Linux Reader (free).
They actually aren’t entirely gone its just tougher to get to them. Everything logged by HA also goes to the system journal and that doesn’t clear with HA (or host) reboot.
You can get to the system journal from the SSH & Web Terminal addon (look in /var/log/journal). However since that addon is alpine based not debian based you have no way to read the journal from within that addon (journalctl doesn’t exist for alpine based systems). So you’ll have to move the files somewhere else that has a way to read them (probably another debian system).
I should probably write a guide on this come to think of it, its a useful trick in a pinch.
All events prior to the time the backup was created are gone though, assuming they even restored from a backup (not mentioned - it might be a clean install).
I re-formated the card with balenaetcher … wasn’t readable by my Mac and when I plugged in an HDMI cable to the Pi I could not see any video signal. Only after removing the card did I get something and that was the missing card message. Reformatted, installed and have a fresh OS, but annoyed it’s come to this.
Which is why I said:
Did you not make backups and copy them off the SD card?
This is pretty much mandatory if you are using storage with relatively low write endurance like SD cards. This can be automated easily, see the options here: https://www.home-assistant.io/common-tasks/os#copying-your-backups-to-another-location
I don’t think restored from a backup would clear it. The journal isn’t actually in the addon, it’s on the host system, its just mapped into the SSH addon. And backups made by HA don’t touch the host system on restore.
That being said it sounds like a clean install and yea that will clear the journal. Bummer.
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