As I fold in more Devices, Systems, and Routines, I am becoming increasingly nervous about failures in equipment and the process by which to get things back up & running! I suppose if you have 3 or 4 devices and a handful of Routines/Scenes, it’s not that big of a deal. However, when you’re approaching multiples of 10’s and various/finely-tuned Routines/Scenes, it would be a huge burden!
It would be nice to be able to periodically back up our Hubs, SmartThings App, Scenes, and Routines and have a method by which to Restore.
At one point, SmartThings had a Migration Tool, to go from v2 to v3 Hubs (see screenshots in this post made by @Automated_House).
“Migrate from SmartThings V2 or V3: With the change from Groovy to Edge drivers, the migration tool no longer works. You must factory reset or unpair each device and pair them.”
To Which I Pose These Questions:
Are there any Developers working on some method of Backup, Restore, and Migrate?
Is there any way (as a community) to get the attention of both SmartThings and Aeotec to implement? They both of course want us to use their products, but without a reliable Backup/Restore System, we are left dangling on the edge of a system failure and hours (days) of getting back up and running.
The best way to get their attention for something like this, particularly since competing platforms do have backup options, is to post the question in a friendly way on one of the marketing channels, like Facebook or Twitter. Just ask if they’re going to add a backup/restore utility like a named competitor has. At least, marketing staff will read it, and that sometimes moves things.
But my own guess (purely a guess) is that they can’t do this because of the fact that they can, and do change the cloud platform without notice. And smartthings is still largely a cloud-based system, even in the world of edge drivers.
Here’s the official schematic for the new architecture:
Otherwise, you could end up restoring your hub to a version that was incompatible with the most current cloud, and everything would stop working and support would have no way to help you other than having you mail in your hub, and we all know how popular that would be.
So that’s my guess. Because people have been asking for backup/restore since at least 2014 and it just hasn’t happened.
I think this statement is very compelling if SmartThings wants Users to stick with them:
I will take your recommendation below and run with it… hopefully more SmartThings Community Members will do the same !
SmartThings has many good things going for it!!! I’d hate to start from Step One after a System Failure, or moving to another platform in advance of a System Failure, because of the lack of a good Backup/Restore Function !
I am just learning no backup. You would think they could take a weekly snapshot in your samsung account and maybe keep the last 3-5. If not that, then my.smartthings.com should allow you to create snapshots. Oh well… If I’m going to have to go crawling under my house to reset my water on/off valve, pull relays out of walls to reset them and dig into the recesses of my house for all the hidden Iot devices, I need to first research hubs that have backup functionality. In this day and age, everything should have multiple backups and points of recovery, but the Samsung hub has none!
You are responding to a post that is more than a year old. A lot has changed in that time.
In particular, smartthings recently has added a backup function. It’s fairly limited and is intended for use when you are migrating from one hub to another, but it is there now.
It does not mean you can restore your hub to a previous version of the firmware: smartthings still has concerns that people might restore to a version which is no longer compatible with the cloud account.
It does mean that backups are taken on a regular basis and can be used to set up a new hub if a Hub fails. Or you just want to migrate to a new model.
So better than nothing, but definitely less than many other platforms offer.
They are so close! I wonder if they will actually take it all the way home to the ability to backup and restore. I’ve always wanted that when creating rules or testing different drivers. I was just researching the competition and when I saw last 5 backups automatically plus the ability to do a backup to local machine on demand, I almost clicked the buy now button. Now I have to rethink whether to stay or jump ship.
