Go back up your HA installation right now.

I, like many others, was running HA OS on a raspberry pi with whatever sd card I happened to have at hand at the time when I started to play with the whole thing.

It has since became a part of my household with light automations and other stuff and with everything going on in life it’s been on a back burner to impove automations more, include more data, manage proper backups and so on. And specially the backups are the one I’ve been slacking on and now I have no one else to blame than myself.

Sd card eventually died yesterday evening and today when I started to study why the server went down but still responded to ping I was greeted with a docker error that exec format is wrong (or something along those lines). At first I thought that maybe some upgrade went sideways and decided to grab a image of the card before messing around it so I have something to come back to which failed almost immediately with IO errors on dmesg.

Gladly I could get a backup off from the card from october, so at worst I lost some automation tweaks on HA side but what I’m still afraid is that I might’ve lost Z-wave keys. Ddrescue is running on the card right now so I don’t have the final results yet but I’m not too hopeful that it’ll create a working image.

So, I did what I should’ve done already ages ago and installed HA on my proxmox server and added that to backup cycle so that’s been taken care of properly and now I’m not limited to Rpi3 performance with addons either. I still need to get a new installation for the pi with Z-wave JS due to RaZberry 7 hat but that should be pretty straightforward task, assuming I can retrieve the keys from broken card.

So: Don’t be like me, verify that you have proper backups of your stuff.

  • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    A 7th-gen i7-powered tiny/mini/micro is perfect for HA. Plenty of grunt for lots of HA addons and integrations, lots of USB ports for dongles (zigbee, z-wave, etc), often with 2x M.2 slots (usually one B/M key and one A/E key) and SATA interface, very low power draw, and cheap due to businesses offloading them all the time.

    • spitfire@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      I don’t think it has the power draw of an N100/N150-based machine (10-15W), but it’s not a huge power hungry server either.

      • Lka1988@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        18 hours ago

        I mean, 35W maximum is still incredibly low. At that point, you’re looking at a cost difference in the single-digits over the course of an entire year.

        My little lab has 5 machines, 3 of which are tiny/mini/micro PCs. Total draw from my entire setup, including the t/m/m machines, is right around 100W. And since I started measuring it back in February, it’s used a total of 635 kWh. And most of that is from the spinning rust hard drives. For reference, my whole household’s monthly usage averages around 1200 kWh.