17 minutes ago, MMAltair said:

I like the idea of implementing a backup function in UD Mobile. My phone has plenty of storage for the backup files and it gets backed up automatically. I know the UDI team is busy deprecating the Java console but if this is primarily a UD Mobile effort perhaps there is an opportunity.

The backup files are tiny. Mine are only a few hundred k and I have a pretty loaded up system. So the data transfer from ISY to your phone should take a split second and the space consumed negligible.

Saw this topic when I was searching for advice on an almost IDENTICAL problem that happened last week after a power failure and upgrade to 6.1.1. I actually had to read the original post twice to make sure somebody hadn't copied the support ticket I submitted. They were that similar, even down to the UPS giving up. The only difference was that my problem (total Insteon comms loss) did not happen immediately after the power was restored, but a few days later ..... so I was not sure initially if it was an Insteon problem, or an EISY upgrade problem.

Michel gave a few good suggestions in replying to the support ticket that were very similar to those in this posting .... recycle power, change PLM outlet/circuit, restore devices, revert to an old backup (oops, this is when you realize you haven't saved one for over a year) but nothing would restore the comms. I could see events happening in the log when Insteon devices triggered, but EISY seemed unable to initiate any communication to anything on the network. Of course I suspected the PLM as well, even though it was a fairly new USB version I bought when I upgraded my 994 to the EISY. Swapping the PLM for my older (capacitor fixed) serial version with some bits of old cables and adapters did not yield any better results, even though the PLM would be an orphan in the network, but EISY was still not able to link anything to the new PLM either - no comms. So maybe the original PLM was OK after all and this was an old school Insteon gremlin, even though I had not changed anything in the house to suddenly cause interference, nor added any new devices to the network.

But then in desperation, I ripped out the EISY and PLM from it's home in my server rack and set it up in another part of the house and it began communicarting ..... mostly. I thought I had identified the problem, if not the root cause.

But then the gremlins really got to work. In 15+ years of using Insteon I never had switches that simply would not function on a local load. Lights would turn on, but then not turn off. Some switches would wait, respond and then start with the red blink. Some would work fine in the morning, but by the afternoon had given up. Activating one scene in one part of the house suddenly turned on a bathroom light and fan that were never part of that scene. It was literally like there was a ghost in the machine.

I am still trying to fix the system. I have done power cycles (which initially allows you to turn off a light that would not respond) but these only work for a couple of cycles. I have done factory resets but then when you restore these from EISY they sometimes work, or go back to their misbehaving ways.

The problem, as has already been mentioned, is that deleting devices from EISY and factory resetting menas a lot iof work to recreate links in all devices that are part of various scenes, and that those deleted devices also disappear from any programs that rrefer to them. So it is not only the time to reset and re-link them, but it's the effort to find where you have to restore them in scenes and in programs. It is much worse with Keypads which may have many scenes and program links. So I have been trying to factory reset the devices leaving them still in EISY and then do a restore to them, assuming what is in the EISY links table is uncorrupted. But the restore device sometimes works, sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes the process completes but leaves the little update required green symbol next to the device, which of course is wrong.

I will continue to try and get the system back working again but it is proving to be a struggle and I am still no closer to figuring out what the root cause of all this disruption is. We have had power outages before as we are on a rural overhead circuit that has it's fair share of problems and the Insteon network has been pretty much stable for several years.

I am even thinking there may be a rogue device somewhere that is failing and causing the problem, but finding it amonst 60+ devices is also a challenge when the communication/functinality problems are not always reproducable.

Thought I would share my story anyways since somtimes there is comfort in shared misery!

On 9/10/2026 at 2:48 PM, Sparks said:

Saw this topic when I was searching for advice on an almost IDENTICAL problem that happened last week after a power failure and upgrade to 6.1.1. I actually had to read the original post twice to make sure somebody hadn't copied the support ticket I submitted. They were that similar, even down to the UPS giving up. The only difference was that my problem (total Insteon comms loss) did not happen immediately after the power was restored, but a few days later ..... so I was not sure initially if it was an Insteon problem, or an EISY upgrade problem.

Michel gave a few good suggestions in replying to the support ticket that were very similar to those in this posting .... recycle power, change PLM outlet/circuit, restore devices, revert to an old backup (oops, this is when you realize you haven't saved one for over a year) but nothing would restore the comms. I could see events happening in the log when Insteon devices triggered, but EISY seemed unable to initiate any communication to anything on the network. Of course I suspected the PLM as well, even though it was a fairly new USB version I bought when I upgraded my 994 to the EISY. Swapping the PLM for my older (capacitor fixed) serial version with some bits of old cables and adapters did not yield any better results, even though the PLM would be an orphan in the network, but EISY was still not able to link anything to the new PLM either - no comms. So maybe the original PLM was OK after all and this was an old school Insteon gremlin, even though I had not changed anything in the house to suddenly cause interference, nor added any new devices to the network.

But then in desperation, I ripped out the EISY and PLM from it's home in my server rack and set it up in another part of the house and it began communicarting ..... mostly. I thought I had identified the problem, if not the root cause.

But then the gremlins really got to work. In 15+ years of using Insteon I never had switches that simply would not function on a local load. Lights would turn on, but then not turn off. Some switches would wait, respond and then start with the red blink. Some would work fine in the morning, but by the afternoon had given up. Activating one scene in one part of the house suddenly turned on a bathroom light and fan that were never part of that scene. It was literally like there was a ghost in the machine.

I am still trying to fix the system. I have done power cycles (which initially allows you to turn off a light that would not respond) but these only work for a couple of cycles. I have done factory resets but then when you restore these from EISY they sometimes work, or go back to their misbehaving ways.

The problem, as has already been mentioned, is that deleting devices from EISY and factory resetting menas a lot iof work to recreate links in all devices that are part of various scenes, and that those deleted devices also disappear from any programs that rrefer to them. So it is not only the time to reset and re-link them, but it's the effort to find where you have to restore them in scenes and in programs. It is much worse with Keypads which may have many scenes and program links. So I have been trying to factory reset the devices leaving them still in EISY and then do a restore to them, assuming what is in the EISY links table is uncorrupted. But the restore device sometimes works, sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes the process completes but leaves the little update required green symbol next to the device, which of course is wrong.

I will continue to try and get the system back working again but it is proving to be a struggle and I am still no closer to figuring out what the root cause of all this disruption is. We have had power outages before as we are on a rural overhead circuit that has it's fair share of problems and the Insteon network has been pretty much stable for several years.

I am even thinking there may be a rogue device somewhere that is failing and causing the problem, but finding it amonst 60+ devices is also a challenge when the communication/functinality problems are not always reproducable.

Thought I would share my story anyways since somtimes there is comfort in shared misery!

Thanks for detailing your Insteon difficulties. I'm in a similar situation where my network has been stable for many years and now continues to have problems. I did find one Switchlink device on my network that failed completely (swollen capacitor) but replacing it didn't solve my other problems.

After removing, resetting, and re-adding every Insteon device to my network things are working reliably again but not without the dreaded ! Mark on a number of devices that I can't get to go away. My assumption is this means there are still communication errors with these specific switches but that is only a guess. Is there another reason EISY would flag an Insteon device with the red ! mark? Other than ! mark on specific switches (about 10 out of 45 devices) everything seems to work properly and can be controlled reliably by EISY.

The thing that mystifies me is why there would be communication failures when all of my devices are now dual band? When I used to have a mix of single band and dual band devices I would have occasional problems which I believed were caused by power line communication issues on the single band devices. These issues went away after I replaced all of the single band devices. I suppose it's still possible there is an Insteon device on the network that is failing and corrupting communications to other devices on the network.

One thing I should mention is I haven't seriously dug into the communication error log. I have many plugins in my system including an Elk plugin that generates an enormous amount of log entries in addition to the Insteon communication entries. The only way I can simplify the log data is to take many of my plugins offline while trying to debug things. That may be the obvious next step to get a better feel for why specific switches are getting flagged by EISY.

On 9/14/2026 at 11:37 AM, MMAltair said:

The only way I can simplify the log data is to take many of my plugins offline while trying to debug things.

The eISY debugging log allows you to filter using regular expressions. This means that you can easily extract Insteon communication from all the other non-Insteon log entries without having to take anything offline.

Edited Thursday at 08:24 AM2 days by kclenden