When I hear hub backup I’m assuming my hub can be backed up and restored. I think that’s closer to the “hub replace” feature. It’s not a complete backup that I can restore from scratch but closer.
This sounds like it’s a “fallback” or secondary hub functionality.
To make things more interesting is there a difference between a “backup hub” and “hub backup”? Do both apply to SmartThings?
Something to think about the terminology. @Nathan_Sterner
@RBoy My “Backup hub” is sitting in the drawer, as my active hub does not have “hub backup”.
This would likely be the event that would push me over to Homey Pro. I am currently controlling all of my ST hub devices via a Homey Community App called SmartThings2. It uses a SmartThings personal access token to access devices on my ST account. This allows me to play with Homey flows without the need to migrate all of my devices and routines. Here is a link to the video I created concerning the setup process, if interested.
Homey is constantly expanding its device compatibility list so I now have only a few devices that would not work with Homey Pro hub. The greatest quantity of incompatible devices are older SmartThings sensors. How ironic is that?
Here is a response from a ST Staff member concerning questions I had about the hub backup feature… https://community.smartthings.com/t/follow-up-on-questions-from-the-hub-backup-feature-post/290633?u=bud_m
Unfortunately, that post is marked “Private” and is not viewable. Was it perhaps a DM?
What is very confusing is why numerous devices (20, to 30 devices) keep going offline after updates, yet ST says everything is working fine and gives no explanation. Yet this is happening to others too so clearly something is going on that ST is keeping secret.
My bad. Here is the reply…
Hi Bud, you had a couple questions on the automatic hub backup feature post that we wanted to reach out to you about. You have a couple of options depending on whether you have Z-Wave devices, which I assume you do have. We hope this helps:
If you have Z-Wave devices and want to migrate off of V2, and you have too many devices to work with the V3 because it has less memory, then you would need to have two V3 hubs with your devices split between them. In this configuration, you will not be able to have the V3 hubs in a hub group or use the hub backup feature (but those hubs would still back up to the cloud automatically and be eligible for the hub replace feature).
If you do not have Z-Wave devices, then you should be able to transfer all devices to a SmartThings station, and your ST Station and V3 hubs could be in a hub group together, but the devices would not be able to all transfer to your V3 backup hub, due to its reduced memory, in the even that your primary ST Station goes offline. ST Station memory for drivers is effectively the same or similar to V2. Alternatively, two ST Stations in a hub group should give you support for all the new hub group features, except Z-Wave.
Homey Pro looks pretty good but expensive.
Is there a list of supported devices somewhere? Their website is very pretty but short on technical details.
The best way to check if a device is supported by Homey is check the App Store
Homey? As in LG Homey? Lol
Wow! No mention of that on the Homey website…
Yep, LG Homey—now with extra corporate seasoning! If they play their cards like Samsung did with SmartThings, we might be in for another “whoops, there goes compatibility” saga. I’m guessing that’s what you’re hinting at?
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.
There are more problems when the number of combinations increases. Testing all the combinations is a huge amount of work. SmartThings has problems already when testing the basics.
SmartThings should also invest in the operation of local VIRTUAL devices. Their operation is still only partial.
Your post has convinced me to avoid ‘hub backup’ and use ‘hub replace’, as and when needed.
I perhaps ought to link this thread to my extended comments in Hub Backup woes.
I don’t know if the ‘hub replace’ shares any of the same issues as ‘hub backup’ as I haven’t used it lately. Currently I am sticking to a hub group (with automatic backup disabled) purely because it gives me multiple TBRs on the same Thread network. Or at least I assume it does. I’d be a lot happier if I could also do that with standalone hubs.