SHS backups for when it all falls apart?

Homey Self-Hosted Server
1

Hey everyone, new to the community but I’ve been using SHS since January and I’m nearing the end of my patience with SHS. Let me explain…

I first installed SHS onto an old Windows PC I had laying around. At first, everything was great. The VM did exactly what I needed and life was good. Then Microslop…I mean Microsoft pushed out a series of updates to my machine that caused it to reboot every 5 minutes. Thankfully I was able to save the critical SHS data from the VM but I determined that the Windows PC was a goner.

I wiped the PC of Windows, installed Linux Mint XFCE on it and installed docker to run Homey SHS on. I was initially able to import my SHS data from the Windows VM into docker but it was LESS than fun. More like, pulling my hair out every 2 seconds hoping that I didnt screw something up.

Full disclosure…Gemini “helped” with getting Linux Mint up and running and I’m seeing that was a big mistake on my part.

For the first few weeks, running SHS in docker on my Linux machine was good. Didnt run into too many issues, except for fighting with network ports to get Matter to work correctly which took me a full day to diagnose and fix. But for the most part, docker and SHS were stable-ish.

I tried to install the 13.2.0 update yesterday and for whatever reason, docker decimated my SHS instance and when I tried to reinitialize it, Docker unknowingly nuked my folders. Thankfully, I had weeks worth of backups so I rebuilt the docker container and migrated my back up data into the new container to restart SHS. That’s when I ran into the problem of trying to create a SHS with a homeyID that had already been spoken for. Long story short, I spent all afternoon trying to get Docker and SHS playing nice again and after fighting, arguing and cussing out Gemini, I determined that even with all of the .homey-shs backups that I had, I couldnt get it working on Linux again.

So, I installed the MacOS SHS this morning and tried to import my Linux back up data into the MacOS version. LOL.

Needless to say, I’ve rebuilt my SHS from the ground up 3 times and each time, it has been nothing short of a nightmare.

Right now, Homey is up and running on my M2 Mac Mini and it’s stable. But these past experiences has made me super weary of everything crashing and I wont be able to recover anything so onto my question.

Is there a different way I should go about in doing backups of my SHS? Or should I just take screenshots of my flows, save them offline and relish in the fact that if my SHS crashes again, I’ll have to re-add all of my devices but at least I’ll have a visual map of my flows?

2

The data folder is in /home/[username]/.homey-shs folder by default (on Linux). I’m not sure about Windows, I’ve never tried installing SHS on my Windows PC but my guess would be either %APPDATA%\homey-shs or %USERPROFILE%\.homey-shs

You should just be able to copy the folder on another machine and get SHS up and running again

3

Every install guide mentions the exact folder containing the home data.

And most times you need to overwrite the data folder before the initial start of homey shs. For Proxmox the installer provided by Athom always starts homey directly. That’s why I have created an alternative install script for Proxmox, which -among other things- makes it possible to skip the initial start. Other platforms may have similair issues.

4

That is essentially what I did with the backups that I made of that folder. The problem that I was running into is that when docker crashed and I tried to bring it back up again and rebuild homey, Homey wanted me to create a NEW SHS. Since the one that crashed in the docker container took the files with it, I had no choice but in order to use my data, I used my backup files that contained the old homey ID. the problem with that was homey didnt like that I essentially cloned my SHS and was forcing me to make a new one without any existing data.

5

That’s strange, was the SHS version on the new machine lower than the old server?

6

The stable version on my linux machine was running 13.1.5. When I tried to update to 13.2.0 yesterday, that’s when everything fell apart. For whatever reason, trying to do a simple update caused my docker to implode on itself and it took the files with it but Homey’s servers still saw that SHS as “Active” and wouldnt let me rebuild it with my backups.

7

In a normal configuration, you create the docker container from the repository. While creating, you have to link a mount path for the data folder.

So you have a containet that’s removed and re-created without data loss. That’s the scenario for docker enabled systems like a NAS.

If you have a VM and the docker container inside the VM, then the data ist still independent from the container itself. But if the installtion for this scenarion includes VM and container, it will recreate the VM if SHS is installed again. So you habe to get access from outside to your VM path to backup the data.

That’ why i prefer the docker installation on a NAS or similar without a VM.