Crazy idea? (set up a second hub with virtual Devices as a potential replacement)

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As the ST starter pack was the on offer, and I wanted the accessories that come with it, I bought one. Then I had a crazy idea.
I have a spare ST hub now to play with…

I have about 100 physical devices and I use lots of custom code that I’m using.
The thought of loosing everything if I have a hardware crash without a backup gives me sleepless nights.
It’s not just the code… I mostly have copies of that on my GitHub account and can find the rest through searching the community. It’s the configuration!
If I had to start from scratch, I don’t think I could completely recreate the config from memory.
So… I’m thinking to manually copy the config from my current hub to the new one… perhaps using virtual devices in place of the physical ones.
I know it would take a while to configure and any changes on my ‘production’ hub would need to be replicated to my ‘backup’ hub but at least it would be easier to copy the config than recreate it from scratch.
Then, in the event of a hardware failure or other serious problem, I could just replace the virtual devices with the physical ones (obviously after a reset and joining them to the backup hub) and everything would be preconfigured. I could be back up running in hours rather than days.
So… feasible or not?
I think it would work…

The next question is one of accounts…
Do I join the new hub to my existing account (as a second location) and have the benefit of all my apps/dth already available? Or, do I create a new account (and add everything I’m using to that account)
What is the likelyhood of my ST account going SO bad that support would not be able to reinstate it (assuming they have backups… I hope they do)?

Ladies & Gentlemen… your thoughts?

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If you’re worried about having backups of your automation look at webCore. If you write all of your automation with webCore, you can generate a backup code. Then in the event of a failure to your hub you can pair all of your devices and then use the backup code to import all of your automations again.

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Thanks for the suggestion Joe but I don’t use webcore.
I prefer to write any apps I need myself (coding then is a learning experience)

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It’s not crazy if it makes sense to you, but you’re actually doing more than double the work, you’re just doing a little bit at a time.

Speaking just for myself, I just keep an Excel spreadsheet of everything I set up, and then I know how to set it up the next time. But different things work for different people in this regard. :sunglasses:

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The more I think about it JD, the more I think you are right.
A simple spreadsheet would be sufficient to record my config and would be a lot less work :slight_smile:
Ok… I’ll have a ‘spare’ ST hub to play with (useful for dev without upsetting my production hub)

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