How is anyone getting on with Hub Backup? Mine seemed to be chugging along fine on my V3 hubs until the last two days. Yesterday and today an automatic failover to a secondary hub took place for no really obvious reason. Allegedly my primary hub was offline but by the time I got a notification about it being offline it wasn’t the primary hub anymore as the automatic backup had kicked without so much as a by your leave. Then minutes later I got a notification it was back online and that it would be switched back automatically to the primary in a few minutes. Several hours later it was saying the same thing. While experimenting I did see it once do the automatic reversion.
The big issue I noticed is that my local VIRTUAL devices all went offline and lost their state, or stayed online and lost their state. That has not happened before. It had the unfortunate side effect of causing Home Monitor to arm. Makes me wonder what is going on lifecycle wise when the hub backup takes place and whether I should be somehow suppressing synthetic events.
The even bigger issue is that I’ve spent the last few hours putting my home back together as every single Matter device, both thread and Wi-Fi, suddenly went offline in SmartThings and couldn’t be brought back. They all worked fine via multiadmin in Google but SmartThings couldn’t control them. Initially it was just the devices on the Hub Group that were offline, but then the additional copies of the devices on a standalone hub went offline too. I had to reinstall every single device. Fortunately they were all on Google Home so it was easy enough, just tedious.
I’d already come to the conclusion that, even when it works, the automatic reversion to a nominated hub probably isn’t a good idea as there is just too much going on. I am now worrying that my migrating from Zigbee to Matter as devices needed replacing was a bad mistake.
When you use multiadmin in Google Home you get to see which SmartThing hub, if any, the Matter device is connected to. I wonder how this works with the Hub Group where the primary hub can chop and change.
Something I also noticed today is that the ownership of devices is beginning to make more sense. It used to be that the owner of a hub connected device was whatever account was in use on the mobile app. Now it seems to be the owner of the Location or the hub (I am not sure which as they are the same for me). This helps avoid the daft situation where ‘Give devices to someone else’ couldn’t work sensibly because not all the devices on the hub had the same owner.