I Broke my Home Assistant

[@videolan]

That auto-ducking backround "music" is really irritating, distracting and unnecessary. Otherwise thanks for the video.

[@damo_c]

Thanks for the warning. Happily skip watching this one.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Thanks for the feedback, I was trying something new, I'll kill it..

[@HiveMindAutomation]

New Version uploading now without the Background Music: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYuonaiser6IhJY

[@dab42bridges80]

Don't just have a single backup, follow the 3-2-1 rule. This applies to any valuable datae, not just Home Assistant. Keep at least three (3) copies of data. Store two (2) backup copies on different storage media. Store one (1) backup copy offsite.(cloud, friends house etc.)

[@B-a_s-H]

^ this.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

I work in IT, I know and should 100% be doing this. Doctor, Heal Thyself.

[@Qosmio1955]

And therein is the key reason why I migrated my HA away from Raspberry Pi to a VM under Proxmox. I'd heard about SD cards failing and didn't want to go down that road. I also have a modified 3,2,1 backup system. It works like this: Firstly, I have a completely separate server that can run HA in the event of the production server failing. I do regular HA backups using the HA backup process. I also clone my production VM before AND after every configuration change or update. I run Proxmox backup server and retain the last 7 nightly copies. I backup separately to a USB hard drive. I backup to OneDrive (that one took a bit of friggin' in the riggin' to get going.) My home is completely at the mercy of a HA failure, especially my off-grid solar system which I monitor using Modbus and MQTT and optimise with HA automations. Some people say I'm paranoid and maybe I am, but I'm confidently paranoid... Bad luck, Stu. I hope everything goes well down the track.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

It's certainly a learning opportunity and I managed to get some content out of it so there's at least some bright side. I'll definitely be doing everything I can to stop relying on SD Cards.

[@Schlaegel]

Same thing happened to me. I hadn't had any issues in a while, so I wasn't worried about a full backup. Then an inconsequential update made me lose everything. I looked for videos on recovering a broken instance and found none. I finished the rebuilding before I found this, but I'm glad you made it. (The music is annoying.)

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Thanks for the feedback about the music. I've been trying something new, I'll kill it.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

New version without the background music

[@HiveMindAutomation]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYuonaiser6IhJY

[@PowerOn-]

Hi, just a suggestion, I found the background music distracting. Had to stop watching after a few minutes

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Noted! I've been trying something new, I'll kill it in future releases

[@HiveMindAutomation]

New Version uploading now without the background music: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYuonaiser6IhJY

[@michaeljsaxon]

Thing I learnt most from this video - Cruft is a real word - and makes a compelling Wordle entry…..

[@HiveMindAutomation]

for some reason IT people use it a lot.... I think because it's less offensive in a business setting than "Crap"

[@neilbrookins8428]

The last time this happened to me- sd card went bad and I thought I lost everything. But, even though the sd card wouldn’t boot I was still able to mount the card in another computer and read the backup files from it that way. This allowed me to restore from backup and get my data back again.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Interesting, I did try to read the SD Card, but my mac wasn't able to read it. I will admit I didn't try super hard.

[@neilbrookins8428]

@@HiveMindAutomation your Mac may not support the native file system of a Linux computer. I was able to mount my HA sd card on my windows laptop by using a free program called “DiskInternals Linux Reader”.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

For clarity, the SD card wasn't even detected as being plugged into the mac. Normally, I could at lease see it on the USB Bus, or attached as a Storage Device, this one wasn't there. on macOS, when you plug in a Raspberry Pi SD Card, one of 2 things normally happens if it can see the card: It'll prompt you that it doesn't recognise the file system and ask if you want to initialise the storage device (format it, blowing away everything on it) or it'll mount a "stub" filesystem in a drive called "boot" where there's a handful of files you can touch/modify/etc

[@MAMDAVEM]

I have a shared experience, I feel your pain. several years ago I lost my HA instance due to a SD card failure, probably because of a power outage whilst writing to the card. This was the prompt for me to move to a USB SSD drive for my Rasp Pi. I would strongly recommend all HA users who rely on an SD card to move to an SSD drive. It is pretty easy and there is plenty of content on KZbin on how to do it. I subsequently moved to a Proxmox instance. I now have a backup on my HA drive, my Synology drive and another PC. I would strongly recommend to make a backup after re-installation and make this a saved for ever backup.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

I'll definitely be exploring moving from SD to USB Attached SSD for a future video. It's been on my "to-do" list for some time.

[@wapphigh5250]

That sucks mate. The new smb samba share disc mount for backup works really well. Couple of new HACS backup downloads are also out there. One incudes making copies easily to google drive. With KZbin help from the bigger channels like everything smart home. Or smarthome guy. With an smb share it’s also easy to navigate to the HA backup folder straight from a Mac using the “go to server” in finder and mount the share right in OSX then copy the tar file to say drop box or Apple notes. Or just use Time Machine. Also back up the Zigbee mesh the same way. Cheers.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

I had looked at the Google Drive HACS backup tool a while back but never set it up. With the SMB Mounts now, especially with EXPLICIT mounts for backups, I'm pretty happy with that, and I'm thankful to have the infrastructure to support it.

[@tomb5372]

Considering how much data HA seems to write constantly I ended up not using a RasPI and instead went with a NUC and a SSD drive instead. I've had too many SD cards fail on me over the years, including Samsung cards that I thought would last a lot longer. And yes, I use log2ram on all my RasPIs.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

This isn't the first time I've had an SD Card Die, after the first one I started shipping the "Recorder" logs off to a mySQL DB running in Docker on my UnRaid server which definitely made it more responsive by not needing to read data from slow SD Storage

[@richie4540]

My HA seems to not like running on a 4gb raspberry pi, with not much more than lighting controls to 10 devices, any ideas how to improve this?

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Without knowing anything else about your setup or what specifically you mean by "seems to not like running", it's hard for me to make any real recommendations here. A 4GB Raspberry Pi should be more than capable, that's what I'm running my Demo Instance on. The very First thing to check is the SD Card you're running from. If the Card is not at least Class 10, preferably better, Im surprised it's even booting. I'm investigating moving my Demo instance off an SD card and onto a Pi Booting from a USB-Mounted SSD soon, that might also improve your responsiveness Other than that there's too many unknown variables for me to make a good recommendation. it could be that the integrations you're using have high latency or any number of things.

[@JoeAiello789]

Why don't you run Home Assistant on UNRAID? That's a primary reason I migrated to it. Plus, I ended up having a Pi to run Kodi on, at a time you couldn't buy a Pi!

[@HiveMindAutomation]

I've tried running the UnRAID Docker Versions of Home Assistant on my UNRAID server but that was a long time ago when those containers weren't what I would call stable. I know there's allegedly a way to get the Supervisor functionality back with the Docker version of Home Assistant as weel, but I've not managed to get it working reliably. Also, I've started having some reliability issues with my UNRAID server recently, giving me pause about adding anymore containers to it. Lastly, I use Pis so I can make these videos for people to get them into Home Assistant and Home Automation, rather than them needing to build a server or setup a NAS and understand how Docker on their NAS works. That said, you're absolutely right, I should probably move my Production onto something more fault tolerant than a Pi. The eMMC storage in the Raspberry Pi CM4 in the HA Yellow is much faster and theoretically more reliable long term than the SD Cards

[@JoeAiello789]

@@HiveMindAutomation, Ah, yes, making the Videos is a great reason to have them, and, BTW, thanks for the education as well! As for HA, I run the full Virtual Machine, so I have access to all features. I've also been using the Google Drive Backup, and was surprised how easy it was to restore that to the Virtual Machine and migrate over. (it might be fun to try this to see if a Migration video is worth doing?)

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Unfortunately my Unraid box is a bit old and doesn't handle VM's particularly well, and I have too many Docker Containers running. Long term plan is to build a more capable server that'll run VM's, at that point I will undoubtedly be looking to do some migrations and maybe even look at some High Availability trickery.

[@Devicesdevices-et3mi]

Shocking background music.......what were you thinking. I had to stop watching unfortunately. Suggestion, remove if possible to save others the pain.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

Sorry for that, I've been trying something new.

[@HiveMindAutomation]

I'm re-uploading the video without the Background Music: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYuonaiser6IhJY

[@Devicesdevices-et3mi]

@@HiveMindAutomation Thanks for that 🙂