I am not a developer, just a dumbshit who messed up his setup. Sorry for the intrusion here, just looking for any advice I can find.
My smartthings app, which I use to remote manage a property, logged me out suddenly after a couple years so I mistakenly logged myself in under the email/pswd I thought it would be. None of my hubs would work so I reset the hub thinking that would fix. Nope. Only after a deep dive into my emails did I find the correct login info, so now I have my devices back in the app, but the hub no longer thinks it belongs to me.
is there a way to restore the hub to previous condition where it spoke with my devices?
even after being logged into smartthings app with a *new login, then resetting the hub, it was unable to find my existing devices. This seems strange, it seems like it should have been able to set up the network as if from new, right?
-lastly, one of our devices is a GoControl thermostat. It doesn’t even come up in the list of devices. What can be done in that situation? I’d really like to avoid installing a new thermostat since we love this one and it works great.
Thank you in advance for mercy y’all can bestow on a civilian dumbass.
Thanks for your time if you read this.
Cheers
is there a way to restore a hub? Unfortunately, the answer is no. ST does not offer any type of backups for their hubs at this point or ability to restore hubs to their previous state. You will need to start fresh.
That was a minor annoyance in 2015 when I started with SmartThings. By 2016 when I had built up a significant installation, it became a terrifying problem. Why 8 years later is this still the case?
We have the GoControl GC-TBZ48 installed in multiple locations
So how would you recommend I go about starting over? I reset the hub and even using my *new smartthings account, it was not able to find any of my devices. I’m kind of at a loss. I agree with jlv, this is a terrifying problem that has actually happened to us and our business. I take the blame for sure.
Previously, some smartthings staff have said that it’s because the system is still largely cloud-based. There were concerns that a customer might restore to an older backup that was incompatible with changes that had been made on the cloud side and end up with a hub that was no longer possible to use with no way to fix it. The example was given that the various voice assistants don’t offer backup and restore for similar reasons.
I suppose it might eventually be possible to create a list of approved restore levels and all that, but that could create a lot of customer confusion and annoyance if customers had a backup they were then not allowed to use.
So the bottom line is just that it’s much more complicated to design a backup/restore system for a cloud-based architecture.
It’s likely that you will have to individually reset each device, because they probably think they still belong to the hub’s old ID, and then you’ll be able to add them as new devices to the hub.
This is a huge amount of work, but you should eventually end up with a re-created network.
The process for doing this kind of reset varies from Model to model, so you just have to take one device at a time and research it.
Most of the primarily zwave ones can (it was part of the Z wave culture for a while), including Homeseer and vera.
The one most similar to smartthings that can, of course, and that supports both zwave and Zigbee, is hubitat.
But pretty much any zwave hub that isn’t cloud dependent will typically have this option. But the ones which are clouddependent may not.
Zigbee never had this as part of the culture, so it’s not very common in primarily zigbee hubs. For example, even the Philips hue bridge doesn’t have a back up and restore option. But home assistant introduced one, and it seems to work pretty well. I don’t think aqara hubs have one yet. Again, hubitat is probably the most popular choice for those used to smartthings that is offering full backup/restore.
Apple HomeKit doesn’t officially offer a back up/restore option, but there are some good third-party apps that do, particularly HomeKit Controller. The thirdparty app Home+ also offers this feature for HomeKit setups, but the interface is more complex.
As @JDRoberts mentioned, Hubitat can backup your setup either locally or with an optional service, to the cloud. It can also backup the radio databases themselves, which would allow you to restore to a new hub without having to re-include (zwave) or re-pair (zigbee) every device to reconnect them to your replacement. This does require Hub Protect, a monthly/yearly service charge applies. They also offer an update/migration path from one hub to another (the C7 to the C8) using the cloud and Hub Protect. For the amount of work it can save, its worth the small fee.
Well, Apple knows how to do it. About a year ago my wife’s iPhone broke. We went to the Apple Store and they cheerfully gave us a brand new one in a box. I brought it home, plugged into my Mac Pro, and in 3 mouse clicks it was completely restored including everything cloud related. It is shocking Samsung does not provide a backup solution. When, ( not if ) your hub brakes, what is your incentive to stay with Samsung? NOTHING.
It won’t restore your Apple HomeKit settings, though. Nobody’s knows why, the information is in your iCloud account. But unless you have used one of the third-party apps that I mentioned, you will lose your rooms, routines, scenes, and some other HomeKit settings.
Fortunately, in that case, however, the third-party apps do a good job at a reasonable fee. But you do have to have created the backups ahead of time. But unfortunately, there’s no similar option for a smartthings setup.
Home Assistant can do both Zwave and Zigbee backup / restore assuming you’re using one of the mainstream / supported chips in their respective coordinator sticks.
For Zwave you can even (with limited support at the moment) use the ZwaveJS_UI tool to backup your configuration from one stick and migrate to a stick of a completely different generation (500 > 700)
For Zigbee both the ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT integrations (the two most common) now support a common standard and you can migrate between them at the api level. The builtin tool (ZHA) can now use that to support radio migration between sticks - one stick assumes the old MAC and BSSID and basically ‘becomes’ the old stick… It’s what they use if someone wants to ‘migrate’ to a ‘SkyConnect’
