Been hearing that smartthings has no backup capability. Seems like a fundamental feature smartthings engineers would have thought considering users countless hours. If not true, would love to know how to backup in any way. if true, when will a backup feature, even if it’s manual, be available? I’m hesitant making anything too complex now.
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No backup, we’ve been asking for literally, years.
However let’s talk about it what actually needs backup. You only need to (and cant) backup the connection info on a given hub for any locally connected ZWave or Zigbee devices. All other info is stored in the cloud and doesnt need to be backed up.
That said because we don’t have that backup function - its a MASSIVE pain to reassociate all your ZWave / zigbee devices with your automations if/ when you lose or replace a hub. (for me its 183 devices and counting)
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so automations are backed up?
Not backed up so much as they don’t have to be, they exist in the cloud.
…But if you lose all the devices in an automation you might wish you’d have been able to back the devices up.
I may be mistaken, but I believe if you have to replace your hub, then you also lose all the automations which are stored in the smartthings cloud if they pertain to devices which were hub connected. 
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I certainly hope that you’re wrong @JDRoberts 
I thought they were tied to location, not hub.
but… Im not willing to smoke a hub to find out. Does anyone know what happens if you have an automation that automates one device - and what happens if you kill that device?
The automations will stay in the cloud but I don’t see how they are going to transfer to a new hub. You could create a second location so you can keep the original automations for reference. It’s my understanding too that when the need arises to replace a hub, you will be readding all of the devices to the new hub as well as retyping all of your automations.
I have a second location that I use for testing which only has virtual devices. Whenever I delete a device, all associated Automations and Scenes are automatically removed as well if the deleted device was the only device used to trigger the Automation or listed in the Scene.
That being said, I’m not sure what would happen to a device if it was reset, and then I tried to add it to the new location since the old location would still have the device ID configured. I’ll have to try that sometime, but if there are issues, then I guess I would just go into the IDE and manually change the device ID in the original location before adding the device to the new location so that I could manually mirror Automations, SmartApps, and Scenes over to the new location.
But, I’m thinking this is a problem for others like me who use the old V2 hubs because only one V2 hub can be joined to a location. I’ve heard that multiple V3 hubs can be joined to the same location, so I’m guessing that all a V3 hub user would need to do is go into the IDE and change the device over to the other V3 hub in the same location maybe???
So its not the removal of the hub but the removal of the device related to an automation that triggers ths deletion. Good to know. And THAT should be a feature request. One I’m entering in a few minutes. Routines used to not disappear.
Its a little more complicated than that as you cant simply ‘move a device’ between hubs. Even though you can technically ‘move’ it in the IDE, AFAIK the device is now in an invalid state as the connection data is still on the old hub… I dont think theyve done anything to transfer the connection metadata.
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If you don’t delete the devices(s) from ST, the rules will stay. When I moved to HE, I just reset my devices using a Minimote so they were NOT actually removed from ST. I then added them to HE and was able to still view the existing rules in ST for reference. I don’t see how you could move a rule from one hub to another though.
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So Rules / automations should be a location thing, not tied to a particular hub. AFAIK certain hubs are now supporting multiple hubs in a single location (@JDRoberts? I think I saw a post on this from you somewhere) so I’m wondering if it’s possible to have a single automation that includes devices from multiple hubs.
@Brad_ST, @blake.arnold. In the past, we did not see Routines disappear when you killed a hub. If this is actually the case - Deleting devices deletes associated automations, therefore deleting a hub would KILL ALL Automations in a location. it makes the need for a backup / restore THAT MUCH MORE PRESSING. We used to at least know we could re-associate all our rejoined devices on new hub - now what? Moving to a new hub kills my setup completely? And all the v.1 users that need to go to a 2015 or better hub to get the v.32 firmware benefits and stay supportable? Add another to the highly urgent pile and a very disappointing Monday.
At the very least, allow the automations to stay around - showing disabled / needing to be fixed before they continue to work.
I guess the ST engineers haven’t considered that if one has to rebuild everything anyway, they’ll look to rebuild it with another platform. Backup = keep customers for more than 1 reason.
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HE has backup / restore but I have not tested that yet. Still migrating from ST to HE.
So I’m clear. If your hub dies, you’d have to re-link each of those 183 devices…?
yep.
wow. that’s insane. thanks so much for the insight.
what planet are these guys on…? backup/restore isn’t rocket science.
guess i need to reconsider ST long-term…
I got burned by this a few months ago when my v2 hub died and I had to go around the house and fiddle around with a fleet of Leviton light switches to get the new v3 hub to pair with them.
It’s criminal that Samsung offers no way to back up and restore this data when just about every other IoT device manufacturer offers some form of backup, even if it’s to their own cloud.
Samsung: PLEASE ADDRESS THIS.
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It is really disappointing that there is no backup/restore option. I had everything set up using the Nvidia Shield link as my hub. This will no longer work in a few months so I’m being forced to replace it but that also means that I have to set everything up again. Thankfully I don’t have 100’s of devices but this is still going to be a pain.
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Also back in August 2020, SmartThings actually posted a website about Migration options. Your mileage may vary if you contact SmartThings support about it though since they removed the website very soon afterwards. But, @Automated_House got evidence of it’s existence (see below). Since SmartThings is no longer supporting some Hub models now, SmartThings really should have a path for ‘migrating’ users configurations from one Hub to another one irregardless of model.
That tool only works for v2 and higher hubs because it requires a firmware level those hubs never got. It wont help with any V1 hub, including the Nvidia Shield or the ADT hubs.
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