Homey Pro 2023 tries and fails to create backup and is unavailable to the app after it

Questions & Help
1

Hello,

I have had a Homey Pro Early 2023 model for some time. I don’t have Homey Backups, and yet it tries to create them every night. However, this fails with the message ‘Something went wrong while creating an automatic backup. Go to the Backups section in the Homey app for more information’

However, when I go next, all I see is a screen to subscribe to Homey Backups. Not to be able to turn it off or anything like that.

It also seems that every time he tries to make that backup, Homey is no longer accessible to the app and a power off / on of the Homey is the only way to make it accessible to the app again. However, devices and flows continue to work as usual.

Would like to hear if people have experience with this / have a solution for this.

Greetings!

2

I assume you already contacted Athom about this?

3

Yes, I’ve got a support ticket opened but the average wait time at this moment is 2-3 weeks, which is quite a long time. So that’s why I am reaching out here too.

4

@robertklep I’ve had contact with Athom support regarding this.

There seems te be a few occasions Homey tries to make a back-up, unintentionally.
The development team is aware of it and looking into it.

For anyone coming across this issue, this is how I fixed it, based on Athom’s suggestion:

  • Invite a different user to your Homey (just create a second Homey account);
  • Transfer ownership to the new user.
  • Transfer ownership back to the original user.

When transfering the ownership, the software checks if a back-up subscription is present. If so, it will turn back-ups on. Else it will turn it off (verified by Athom).

This worked for me and case is now closed.

5

Thx for the Solution provided. Even now, in 2024 the issue is still occurring. I will try the Solution and confirm if this still works or not.

It is also important to note that my Homey also ‘freezes’ during this event and I need to restart it to be able to use the app again and make it connect. Seems that in the background Homey does fire events and does its thing, but it is unavailable via the app. When I restart Homey, I can connect to it again via the app and then I see the Backup issue message in the Timeline.

I now have setup a daily restart at 03.00 as the backup seems to be fired somewhere around 02.00, even when I do not have any Subscription for a Backup ongoing.

6

Like you already concluded, Homey is not frozen or offline, it is just doing it’s thing, only the app temporary can’t connect to Homey for some reason (this is a years old bug).

Restarting Homey every x hours, are just (bad) workarounds imho.
It seems Homey’s cloud connection gets lost in space.

  • With your phone: temporary disabling wifi and connect to 4G might ‘wake the app’ for that one time.
  • Temporary disabling wifi / unplugging LAN connection probably solves it for that one time.

Install Net Scan app to check the state of your router. You’ll discover Homey is not offline in most cases
Having a script or Net Scan check your internet connection might prevent the “homey is offline” issues.

With Net Scan, you can check the state of any internet URL, like, every 10 minutes.

With the Homeyscript “Run code and return a text-tag” card, you can run the code below, every, say, 10 minutes

const url = 'https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random'; // or something else
const resStatus = await fetch(url);
if (!resStatus.ok) {
  throw new Error(resStatus.statusText);
}

const json = await resStatus.json();
const quote = json.value;
const result = url + ": " + quote;
log (result);
return result;