This week I had a horrible experience due to a failed upgrade to 1.7.719 on my Vera lite. Everything was working fine before the upgrade but this firmware version made me loose all of my devices. Restore from an earlier backup I made just before hitting the upgrade button didn’t work and also going back to factory defaults and then restoring a recent backup would not bring back any of my devices ??? So I had no other choice than to explain my wife and kid’s that wall switches didn’t work as they used to anymore and they needed to go and turn on and off each lamp individually, while I spent all my evenings rebuilding Vera from scratch by slowly excluding and including my devices and trying to remember what code I had used for my different scenes.
Questions:
As I am not eager to go through this pain full experience again I was wondering if the following setup could help preventing our house from going dark & cold for a full week.
[ul][li]If I would buy another Vera lite, second hand or new if it’s still sold somewhere, can I set up this 2nd device as a perfect clone of my ‘primary’ Vera?
[/li]
[li]Are there any lua or shell scripts that would allow me to schedule a Z wave and device backup at regular intervals and restore these backups to my Vera clone to keep it in sync with my primary Vera?[/li][/ul]
The whole idea here is basically to swap out one Vera for another in a matter of minutes should any firmware disaster strike again.
Thanks a lot for any feedback and pointers.
Jacques
Oh and btw, is it possible to de-activate the ‘new firmware available’ message? Every time I open up the Vera web page I get this message but I am not exactly in the mood to upgrade again before I am 100% sure I can go back to a working system without wasting hours of time.
To make sure you have a fail-safe backup you need to have good management process!
After you make any Z-Wave additions or removals … You need to do a Z-Wave backup.
This creates a file on your Vera that contains your Z-Wave configuration.
This is NOT generated by doing a normal Vera backup, but the file generated from this step is included in the Vera backup.
Doing a factor reset does NOT change the z-wave chip configuration. It should have the same Z-Wave configuration.
When you boot up after a factor reset it should know that the Z-Wave devices exist … as if you just included them …
but now what you named them, or what room they are in, …
If you want to FORGET all of the devices you need to do a RESET Z-Wave network. This will create a NEW Network ID for your Vera.
All of your devices will only be able to connect to the previous Network ID … so they will be disconnected.
Now if you have Z-Wave configuration problems … that file from step 1 is very important.
You need to RESTORE the Vera Backup … but also select the option to RESTORE your Z-wave network.
This option is OFF by default. The Z-Wave is restored from the file generated from Step 1 when this option is selected.
So if you do not do step 1 after you change your configuration, and you select this option, you could end up restoring a very old Z-Wave configuration.
And as noted earlier, a backup does NOT do step 1 for you!
[ul][li]The importance of doing a Z-wave backup before doing a Vera device backup[/li]
[li]The existence of a Z-wave network ID, specific to my Vera unit[/li][/ul]
I guess the last point will make it difficult, if not impossible, to restore a backup from one Vera to another Vera as there will be a mismatch in Z-wave network ID’s. Is that correct?