ZHA integration to do nightly backup of both Zigbee Coordinator adapter/dongle/stick and Zigbee network/database?

Feature Requests
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1

Request the ZHA integration run backup every night of your Zigbee network + Zigbee Coordinator.

Needed to achieve a full backup as though ZHA configuration is stored in a zigbee.db database file, all Zigbee node, network and keys info are stored on the physical Zigbee Coordinator adapter/dongle/stick.

Backups can also be used to allow users to easily migrate from ‘old’ to ‘new’ Zigbee adapter hardware.

Preferably such a Zigbee Coordinator and Zigbee network backup feature should be enabled by default as that way even if your Zigbee Coordinator adapter/dongle/stick or ZHA installation gets lost, broken and corrupted for whatever reason you will always be able to restore and recover it all to a replacement Zigbee Coordinator. If backup and restore is done properly then users won’t need to repair any devices.

Having backup features in ZHA’s UI would also make migration/upgrade between coordinators easier.

Note that some zigpy radio libraries like zigpy-znp and bellows (which the ZHA integration depends) already feature integrated CLI tools for performing manual backup and restore of the specific Zigbee stacks/radios that they support and write/read files in the Open ZigBee Coordinator Backup Format.

The video by Everything Smart Home linked above goes over the basic steps for doing a manual backup to file of a Silicon Labs based Zigbee Coordinator adapter with bellows CLI commands and then restoring that manually to a Texas Instruments based Zigbee Coordinator adapter with zigpy-znp CLI commands covered in his gist:

Note! Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M) have already implemented an automatic backup feature which is enabled by default on all installation and runs every night wheather or not the end-user is aware of it or not. See:

PS: Personally I think this is a must-have feature for added user-friendliness when Amber support ZHA:

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This feature will be so much helpful if it can be achieved .

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The HA devs have identified zigbee with ZHA as one of two protocols for communication between a HA system and zigbee compliant devices. On the basis of this I have changed over to a zigbee radio network using the Conbee 2 talking to Philips down lights. This has been a great success. I have around 20 of these lights installed in ceilings. But now I find that there is no practical way to maintain this system into the future with ZHA as the radio network is apparently stored on the zigbee radio stick.
I have two nuc HA systems with one a backup for the other but I cannot practically make a second Conbee 2 stick copy on a regular basis. This is a show stopper for me. My zigbee development has come to a halt.
Should I switch to zigbee2mqtt? I am prepared to get new coordinators if necessary to continue with ZHA as I thought ZHA was the officially sanctioned future path for zigbee on HA.
Home Assistant is rapidly becoming a significant player in the home automation sphere. It would be very helpful if we could see some HA road map to guide us.

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With the ZHA component being a native integration it really makes ZHA a very good entry point for Home Assistant beginners, so IMHO each additional feature that makes it even simpler and easier to use is great news for new users. Super fun when HA beginners say “plug and play” and “it just works”.

However, I think the ability to easily make backup and perform recovery should be equally important.

The only thing we do know for sure is that the official “Amber” hardware appliance for Home Assistant will come with a Silicon Labs (EZSP) based Zigbee module and that those are only working well with ZHA today. So my guess, therefore, is that Nabu Casa / Home Assistant founders will prioritize ZHA.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2021/09/13/home-assistant-amber/

“Home Assistant Amber includes the latest and greatest Zigbee radio chip from Silicon Labs to communicate with smart devices in your home. The chip is forward-compatible with the upcoming Matter smart home connectivity standard, in which Silicon Labs is heavily involved.”

https://www.crowdsupply.com/nabu-casa/home-assistant-amber

…and while Zigbee2MQTT did get initial support for Silicon Labs (EZSP) Zigbee adapters that code was all done by one developer and he is no longer maintaining it in Z2M so there is no future roadmap for Silicon Labs (EZSP) support in Zigbee2MQTT.

ZHA is the only Zigbee implementation that is a natively integrated component of Home Assistant so I hope that the Home Assistant founders will primarily promote that over third-party integrations, but I have not read anywhere that ZHA is “the officially sanctioned future path for zigbee on HA” or that “HA devs have identified zigbee with ZHA as one of two protocols for communication between a HA system and zigbee compliant devices”.

I assume that the other of the two protocols mentioned is Z-Wave, and it is understandable that the Z-Wave userbase in Home Assistant will be much easier to grasp as there is really only Silicon Labs based chips for it so far and most users will probably the Z-Wave JS integration for that if they are not using commerical gateways/bridges/hubs like Samsung SmartThings Hub, Telldus Live, and Fibaro Hub.
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Too me it does not sound like the statistics from Home Assistant Analytics give much insight into Zigbee users because can not really tell how many users or who is using what type of devices in third-party integrations unless the proprietary gateway/bridge/hub in practice only support one single protocol (like IKEA Trådfri Gateway and Philips Hue Bridge), see discussion here:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-founders-believe-there-is-currently-only-around-50-000-installations-of-zha-integration-what-do-you-zigbee-users-in-the-community-think-about-those-statistics/357305/

If you switch to either a newer “Texas Instruments” (ZNP) or “Silicon Labs” (EZSP) based Zigbee dongle then you can automate backups via Batch Scripts using “zigpy-znp” or “bellows” CLI tools respectively.

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#compatible-hardware

…but for ConBee/RaspBee I believe that using the deCONZ application and its GUI is the only way to backup them(?) so in that case not easy to automate ConBee/RaspBee backups if using ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT(?).

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Hedda, thanks for your insights and very detailed understanding of the situation. I am comfortable getting a couple of new coordinators along the lines you have indicated and strongly prefer this to further entanglement with a propriatory deconz environment. However, I had hoped to avoid using batch scripts , etc. Doable but time consuming given my current lack of these specific skills. (I am comfortable using Python in Appdaemon.)
If the Nabu Casa / HA is likely to provide a UI for managing zigbee backup in the near future I would prefer to wait for that. Alternatively, does the Everything Smart Home video which you included above implement the batch script to which you refer. I could probably follow that path.

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No guarantees of that, I’m not even sure if any Home Assistant founders are using ZHA themselves(?).

FYI, zigpy developer puddly has however started development on a unified command line interface for zigpy radios so zigpy could hopfully contain all needed backup commands for any radio in the future(?).

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/issues/557

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/pull/848

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/issues/842

Perhaps if and when all unified backup commands are in zigpy then the “zigpy-cli” will get those as well.

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-cli

No it only contains bellows and zigpy-znp commands he used to do manual backup and restore, see:

https://gist.github.com/EverythingSmartHome/990f2436608fd347cd20cf0009b5cef4

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/wiki/Coordinator-Backup-and-Migration

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-znp/blob/4ac608c82b6f48d304bab9a20bd648450bed54a7/TOOLS.md#tools

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/backup-your-zha-husbzb-1-stick-and-even-seamlessly-migrate-to-a-new-stick-without-re-pairing/229044

So today you would have to write your own batch script and automate scheduling when it will run.

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@all Hi everyone: any idea how this can be done on an HA raspberry based appliance? bellows depends on some crypto packages that need compilation. So even with a virtualenv to isolate the python packages this does not work on the Home Assistant OS installation.

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Did somebody find a way to backup the Conbee II ? Following the instructions on Phoscon website by backing the zll.db file I get nowhere, I cannot find the file. Furthermore I am using ZHA and trying to load DeconZ only 3 devices show up …

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zigpy developers are apparently working on deconz backup and there is a draft pull request for it here:

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-cli/pull/2

At least that is how I interpret answer from puddly when posted this feature request for zigpy-deconz:

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-deconz/issues/177

Started separate forum discussion thread on zigpy-deconz / zigpy-cli backup of ConBee/RaspBee here:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zha-libraries-will-soon-support-conbee-raspbee-backup-and-restore-that-can-be-used-for-zigbee-network-migrations/374782

Note! Understand that zigpy and the zigpy-deconz radio libraries which ZHA depends on are all free and open-source library with only volunteering developers working on them without pay so remember and you and anyone else are also are more than welcome to code the feature for it (the zigpy developers have so far been more than happy to help and other volenteering developers who are willing to step in to assist with helping to fix bugs or add features).

Off-topic, please either start a new separate discussion thread or reply to that existing thread instead:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/backup-your-zha-husbzb-1-stick-and-even-seamlessly-migrate-to-a-new-stick-without-re-pairing/229044/

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btw, know that puddly who develops zigpy-znp is planing to implement unified backup into zigpy-cli that will mean that once implemented you can use same backup command to backup all radio brands. See:

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy-cli/pull/2

1 Like
11

Tip! @le_top added possibility to backup your Zigbee network to a JSON file within Home Assistant by using “zha_custom” custom component by mdeweerd (originally fork of zha_custom by Adminiuga):

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zha-custom-service-to-send-custom-zha-commands-extra-functions/373346

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Mentioned “zha_custom” fork by @le_top has been renamed to “zha-toolkit” and moved to a new repository from mdeweerd on GitHub and a Blueprint make it a bit easier to achieve nightly backups:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/daily-znp-zigbee-coordinator-backup-blueprint/377149

https://github.com/mdeweerd/zha-toolkit

https://github.com/mdeweerd/zha-toolkit/blob/dev/README.md#znp_backup-backup-znp-network-data

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zha-toolkit-toolkit-service-providing-low-and-high-level-zigbee-commands-through-zha-zigpy/373346

13

Hi,

I’m planning to migrate to a new coordinator. (I’ve ordered one of those Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus devices.) I was trying to make a backup of my current coordinator. I’ve installed zha_toolkit. However, when I execute the following command:

service: zha_toolkit.execute
data:
  command: znp_backup

I get this error:

'ControllerApplication' object has no attribute '_znp'

What’s going wrong here and how can I fix that?

14

See this:

znp_backup is for CC2xxx (TI) adapters, ezsp_backup for Silicon Labs based adapters.

1 Like
15

Ah, that wasn’t mentioned in the readme. Are the backups compatible? In other words, can I restore my EZSP backup to my new CC2xxx stick?

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2022-01-19 17:17:43 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.zha_toolkit.utils] Parameters '{'command': 'ezsp_backup'}'
2022-01-19 17:17:43 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.zha_toolkit] module is <module 'custom_components.zha_toolkit' from '/config/custom_components/zha_toolkit/__init__.py'>
2022-01-19 17:17:43 DEBUG (MainThread) [custom_components.zha_toolkit] event_data {'ieee_org': None, 'ieee': 'None', 'command': 'ezsp_backup', 'start_time': '2022-01-19T16:17:43.731062+00:00', 'errors': ['AttributeError("\'ControllerApplication\' object has no attribute \'_znp\'")'], 'params': {'cmd_id': None, 'endpoint_id': None, 'cluster_id': None, 'attr_id': None, 'attr_type': None, 'attr_val': None, 'min_interval': None, 'max_interval': None, 'reportable_change': None, 'dir': None, 'manf': None, 'tries': 1, 'expect_reply': True, 'args': [], 'state_id': None, 'state_attr': None, 'allow_create': False, 'event_success': None, 'event_fail': None, 'event_done': None, 'read_before_write': True, 'read_after_write': True, 'write_if_equal': False}, 'success': False}
2022-01-19 17:17:43 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.helpers.script.websocket_api_script] websocket_api script: Error executing script. Unexpected error for call_service at pos 1: 'ControllerApplication' object has no attribute '_znp'

Well, ezsp_backup gives me exactly the same result… :thinking:

17

Maybe open an issue on his github ?

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Done. It’s acutally the very first issue in the repo: Weird error · Issue #1 · mdeweerd/zha-toolkit · GitHub

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It’s mentionned in the readme, but you can always suggest an improvement !

I prepared a more general backup command that will direct to the right backup procedure.

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First of all, please respect that this specific thread is a feature request discussion and meant for support so please start a separate thread if asking for support/help and not discussing the feature request.

Understand that for support will need Zigbee Coordinator chip and firmware have today to migrate from.

As franscisp mentioned above; “znp_backup” (backup via zigpy-znp) is only for Texas Instruments Z-Stack / ZNP adapters/firmware, and “ezsp_backup” (backup via bellows) is for only Silicon Labs EZSP (Silabs EmberZNet Serial Protocol) adapters/firmware. There is as of yet no backup support for other types of Zigbee Coordinator like “deconz” (ConBee/RaspBee), “zigate” (ZiGate), or “xbee” (Digi XBee).

Both “znp_backup” and “ezsp_backup” save/restore using “Open ZigBee Coordinator Backup Format” which indeed means that you can backup a Silabs EZSP adapter and restore to TI ZNP or vice versa in order to use it as a migration method.

https://github.com/zigpy/open-coordinator-backup

The same Open ZigBee Coordinator Backup Format can obviously be used for migrating from older to newer adapter hardware/firmware with old respectively new chips from same chip manufacturer. Read:

https://github.com/zigpy/zigpy/wiki/Coordinator-Backup-and-Migration