Power loss resilience

Hi. Powered up the Zee today for the first time and have started configuring devices. I have already experienced a power loss causing a corrupt file system on the Zee and needed to restore to factory which was very straightforward following Rich's instructions.

However I'm thinking now that maybe the file system on the Zee is a bit more fragile to what I'm used to (Windows running on a laptop) so just thought I'd put a couple of questions out there to find out what others are doing ?

Are you running your Zee on UPS with some notification for a clean shutdown if mains power goes ?

What are you doing about backups ?

Thanks and look forward to your thoughts ?

Phill

[mrhappy]

Whilst I don't run the Zee I run a R-Pi which I turn on and off by rotary switch, I also have had on a number of times the file system corrupted by turning it on and off by the switch. If you search the net there does seem to be some reports of corruption issues with the R-Pi when it is powered hard on/off.

With it drawing next to nothing power wise you could get away with a small UPS and get many hours of it running, certainly enough time to notify you and get you to shut it down correctly.

Have not seen any HS plugins for UPS's and Linux but they might be about or you might be able to get a python script from the net somewhere and get it to talk to HS so HS shuts itself down.

Hope you are OK with the weather, some of the pictures on the news are terrible.

[rmasonjr]

Same here - mine is connected to a UPS, so it never goes down unless I pull the plug manually. I have had to pull the plug a time or two, but luckily no corruptions.

My backups are manual - I just copy off the /usr/local/Homeseer folder to a dropbox folder. One day, I will get around to automating it.

[Phill]

Is there a preferred way of shutting down Homeseer from a script. I know that 'kill pid' will stop the process but is this a clean shutdown ? Once the process is stopped then it should be a simple case as you say of copying the folder and restarting Homeseer.

I like the idea of copying to dropbox. I'll give that a go.

Phill

[Pete]

The currently utilized (two years?) archlinux arm based pogoplug with mono sprinkler setup I have does do a clean shutdown of the application and mono ever night (morning); a backup "script" runs backing up everything to a mini USB stick. One completed then a reboot of the device happens. The working drives (USB) are either 2Gb or 4Gb (with extra space). The application / OS is way smaller than 2Gb though. This device is inside of my sprinkler box. The Zee HS directory does include clean application and OS shutdown scripts. Yup you cannot really back up a "mounted" device to do a snapshot other than maybe a reboot to a secondary OS and having the secondary OS image the primary OS hardware.

[Phill]

Cheers Pete. Thanks for your advice (again 8-) and I've had a look and now found the restart script so will be making use of this soon.