I had a major power failure 2 weeks ago that messed up my zwave network. It was a bit unusual in that only the B side power was lost, so that some things in the house were working and others were not, the worst of which was the AC which requires 240 V. Not good in the Texas heat.
My vera is on a 1000 VA UPS, along with the router and a switch, but the power was out for about 12 hours and it drained the UPS.
When the power company fixed the problem, vera came up OK but was unable to connect to any of the z wave devices. I have a TED 5000 which communicates via direct wired lan to the network and a wireless foscam IP camera, both of which worked without any problems. So part of the configuration in Vera not involving the zwave aspect still worked fine.
I tried to restore a backup from mios.com of a known working configuration. This did not fix the problem with all the zwave devices.
I had to exclude all the devices, the delete the devices on UI4, then reinclude all of the devices. That worked, but several of the devices had to be excluded/reincluded a second or third time before everything worked.
The PROBLEM is that this is the second time in the past 3 months that everything has failed, and that restoring a backup has not solved the problem. I know how to fix it but I don’t want to screw around for 4 or 5 hours every time this happens, having to reconfigure the options on several of the devices, and rebuilding all the scenes that are affected.
Is there a more reliable backup strategy that works?
At first I thought, if Vera was still online with only half your devices functional, it’s possible Vera re-worked the routing. (assuming you were running 3.20, Vera was still online and the power was out between midnight and 2:00am ish…) ??
But a previously functional back/restore would have rectified that issue…
I’ve heard other users (@Wseverino) and I’ve experienced personally, the occasional device lockup that would not respond and caused slowness on the network. @Wseverino discovered that this was rectified by turning the power off and back on again…
I had a problem where Vera completely stopped working. It couldn’t send any commands to any nodes. There was nothing in
my environment that I can attribute to the failure. I did a restore, which did no good. I called MCV, emailed them a backup, and they successfully restored my Vera. Only one device out of 43 had to be reincluded. They did a restore that isn’t available from the UI. they said something about only restoring the Z-Wave devices. I didnt have scenes so it wasn’t a problem for me.
So things started working again, but I lost confidence…
Yes it just seemed like the zwave device configurations needed to be restored, since the scenes were still there and the non z-wave devices ie “foscam IP device” and google weather, the TED 5000 and LG air conditioner device via sqblaster were all there and working normally. It is very possible vera did a network heal when only half the zwave devices were receiving power, which may have affected the zwave routing but none of the zwave devices was being recognized. Next time I will get tech support involved. BTW I did reset the whole house power breaker after power had been restored before I restored vera from an online backup but that did not help anything.
I have heard MCV techsupport solves this by doing a z-wave device restore (essentially restoring the z-wave database).
Im assuming this process is basically the same or similar to the cloning of a z-wave dongle as described on the corresponding Wiki page.
Since its a seemingly returning issue with different users, i would like to ask MCV to document the special backup restore process for us in more detail.
I think in theory a restore of a backup of both Vera’s database and the Z-Wave chip’s database should take care of everything. Sounds like in your case the Z-Wave chip’s database got corrupted somehow and needed restored. Or did you already check that option when you restored from backup yourself?
Ive been looking through the wiki, but again there seems to be some snippets of info throughout the wiki on this.
If you can find time (and motivation) could you whip something together that describes the different backup and restore steps for both Z-wave and regular settings you think?
Henk
I think in theory a restore of a backup of both Vera’s database and the Z-Wave chip’s database should take care of everything. Sounds like in your case the Z-Wave chip’s database got corrupted somehow and needed restored. Or did you already check that option when you restored from backup yourself?[/quote]
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