Let's discuss backup strategy

[Guy Lavoie]

After being a UDI user for just over a year now, I've noticed a few things with being involved with the hardware/software and the community.

- There is often excitement...and trepidation when new releases of IoX come out. I've seen the birth of 5.9.1, Matter support, and now 6.0.0 and eisy-ui. It appears that it's not rare that something doesn't quite turn out as expected and the update causes some users to not be able to reconnect with their controller, and require some extra manual steps (ie: pkg install ...) to get it working. In some cases it just fails and a ticket is needed. Other times there are some unexplained effects, like the "small filesystem" that a few of us ended up with on a Polisy.

- A few of us have more than one controller. Myself I have a eisy actually running things, and two Polisys. Sometimes it happens from having upgraded from one to the other, or by chancing upon a unit for cheap or free. I certainly enjoy have the two Polisys for experimenting. When a new release comes out, I'll try it on a test controller (Polisy) first. It's a great, risk-free way of trying things out and learning about new stuff, like eisy-ui. Having the ability to reflash the SSD on a Polisy adds greatly to the "risks" we can take! I like to try things that would be quite foolhardy on a running system.

My reason for starting this thread is that I'd like to see what people are doing for backup. Not just file backups as we see in the menus, but actual operational backup, in case our main controller fails (failed upgrade or whatever). A lot of us have come to depend on our controllers, and having voice control with Alexa has often widened the user base to our families too. When things stop working, we quickly get called upon to "fix it!".

At minimum, A serious (read: highly dependent) user should at least have a spare PLM, and a spare power supply for the controller isn't a bad idea either. Having a spare controller is a bit more expensive, and moving our operations to another one when our main one fails isn't exactly a simple process. In fact that's the real reason I'm starting this discussion: does anyone have that kind of plan? How are you doing it, to be in a state of readiness? For the purpose of this discussion, let's stick to switching between eisy and Polisy (both: between same type of controller, or from one to the other). Several sticking points come to mind:

- Zwave: how do you backup zwave when you have a zooz stick? Is it included in the main IoX backup? The Zmatter dongle offers a backup/restore menu, but zooz doesn't. With Zmatter, is it as simple as moving the dongle over and restoring the zmatter backup? How about zooz? If you have a Zmatter dongle insie a Polisy, you'll need an adapter if you want to be able to quickly move to a eisy.

- Insteon: usually that just requires you to move the PLM over. But if you have a Polisy with a serial PLM, you'll need a USB to serial adapter.

- IP based connections: If you have plugins, network resources, and especially external devices or apps that send REST commands to your controller, It will be complicated if it ends up with a different IP address. To switch controllers, you'll probably have to play with your router's DHCP address reservations so that your replacement controller has the same IP address as the controller you're replacing.

- Portal access: The difficulty here is that portal subscriptions are based on your controller UUID. And that is based on the network card's MAC address. Even if UDI moves over your subscription to your new UUID, do you have to manually recreate all the device definitions? Or can UDI actually reassign all the definitions to the new UUID at the same time? This still means that you can't quickly move over to another controller, without external support.

- Plugins: This is probably the most complicated part, especially with paid plugins. I know that the plugins pathnames include the UUID of the controller. Can plugins be backed up and restored on a different controller without external intervention.

I think we have enough here for getting a good discussion going...