The IMPORTANCE of BACKUPS & Patience

[oceanman93]

All,

 

I cannot tell you all how important a good backup is as I just went through a hellish incident I don't wish on anyone. While away, a friend stopped over my house to find out that he was unable to open my garage doors with MobiLinc. Next he tried the Morning door keypads with a manual code. Nothing on both doors. My house was locked out by automation. The only way he was able to get in was via an older Sears RF garage door keypad. Otherwise it would have been time to break a window!

 

Upon entering, he noticed that some lights were on having been turned on from a nightime program at some point. It appeared that ISY wasn't able to communicate with any device. He rebooted ISY but it was the same. He unplugged the PLM and back in and it seemed to talk briefly then nothing again. So he left my house dead in the water until I could get back home. I had no idea that there were any issues since I get a daily status message from ISY just so that I know it is alive. I just didn't know that it couldn't talk to anything but me.

 

I ordered a new PLM Amazon Prime so it was there the next day when I got home. I replaced the PLM and did a PLM Restore but there were many things that still were not working properly. I couldn't make any sense out of it so I decided to do a full Device Restore since some devices were ok while many others were just behaving weird. The Device Restore FAILED to see 5 FanLincs, 6 KPLs, a few SwitchLincs and ApplianceLincs. The next step I decided to take was to restore an ISY backup from two months ago. I couldn't believe that many devices went bad. Upon doing the RESTORE backup, all my devices were again visible. However, the devices that I tried to restore from the corrupted version and failed somehow corrupted the devices themselves. I did individual device restores on the ones that were misbehaving and now all seems to be ok. I'll tell you I felt like banging my head against the wall a few times as it is so confusing when things just don't make sense.

 

After all of this mess, the only things that are truly bad are the old PLM and a MorningLinc controller which by the way was locking out my door keypads from even being able to be used with manual codes, hence my first statement regarding being locked out from all automation including the battery operated Morning door locks! Just by unplugging the MorningLinc allows the door keypads to work again. I guess I could have cut the power to the house from outside and the door keypads would have worked!

 

So everyone backup, backup, backup. If I didn't have a good backup, I would have been starting from scratch and that involves currently 86 devices. Time for a cold one.

[Michel Kohanim]

Hi oceanman93,

 

Thanks so very much for sharing this incident with us. Perhaps we should have instructions in the quick start explaining the only times that backup/restore should be used. For instance, restoring either ISY or Devices will most likely exacerbate problems arising from communication issues. Restoring PLM should only be done when:

1. There are no links in the PLM

2. The PLM has been replaced

 

Restoring ISY should only be done if:

1. You have a new SD Card

2. You do want to go back to an older/newer configuration ... this must be followed by Restore Devices if and only if the configuration of devices (scenes/relationships) need to be changed

 

In short, restoring ISY/Devices/PLM usually makes things worse unless used for specific purposes.

 

With kind regards,

Michel