HELP - Computer completely Fried

[pdwatermelon]

Its been a while- Installed HS3 pro 5 years ago, set it, forget it. NOW the worst. HD Failure. What on earth do I do. Can I just download HS3 on a new computer and plug my z-wave stick and be good, or am I toast haha. Is anything backed up on the web, or was I supposed to do that locally.

SOO sad right now!

[ewkearns]

Its been a while- Installed HS3 pro 5 years ago, set it, forget it. NOW the worst. HD Failure. What on earth do I do. Can I just download HS3 on a new computer...

Yes!

and plug my z-wave stick and be good,

No! You've lost everything since your last saved backup (If you have one, you can restore that, but will have lost everything since the last saved backup.)

...or am I toast haha. Is anything backed up on the web, or was I supposed to do that locally.

Yes, it was for you to manually back up locally (or otherwise).

[pdwatermelon]

OH my goodness! So Did my Z-wave stick at least save all the connections, or will I have to read every switch again as well. (i only have 100) This is a mess, haha, I had HS designer with custom design - Guessing I will have to redo that -

LAST thing, I can't find download for HS3 PRO only HS4 now? Is that available?

[mulu]

I had a catastrophic failure when HS4 destroyed the my device DB. There is some information stored on the z-wave dongle but trying to associate that information with my devices in HS was too much work with the risk something will still go wrong. So I ended up doing a new installation, de-register all my z-wave devices and include them all again. It was a HUGE pain but probably was the best option I had at that point. Of course, all of the HSTouch screens had to be redone as well because the device IDs changed. I am still recovering from this mishap more than a year ago but I also did a bunch of improvements in the process. So backup your setup locally and to the cloud and you probably want to keep a version history just in case you get hit by ransomware.

[ewkearns]

OH my goodness! So Did my Z-wave stick at least save all the connections, or will I have to read every switch again as well. (i only have 100) This is a mess, haha, I had HS designer with custom design - Guessing I will have to redo that -

Mulu has been there and done that, I'd use him as a source.

LAST thing, I can't find download for HS3 PRO only HS4 now? Is that available?

It is still around. See here.

[pdwatermelon]

Thanks so much for the help! gonna be rough, but its for sure on me! oops

[George]

OH my goodness! So Did my Z-wave stick at least save all the connections, or will I have to read every switch again as well. (i only have 100) This is a mess, haha, I had HS designer with custom design - Guessing I will have to redo that -

LAST thing, I can't find download for HS3 PRO only HS4 now? Is that available?

Restore from your last full backup, then restore from your last incremental. Then you can read network from the Z-Stick and recreate the Z-Wave database.

[Uncle Michael]

Its been a while- Installed HS3 pro 5 years ago, set it, forget it. NOW the worst. HD Failure. What on earth do I do. Can I just download HS3 on a new computer and plug my z-wave stick and be good, or am I toast haha. Is anything backed up on the web, or was I supposed to do that locally.

SOO sad right now!

One possibility to try. You may still be able to read information off your drive, just not boot from it. Use a caddy to make it a USB external drive and see if you can retrieve any info from it from another computer. (Search for "recover data from a damaged hard drive".) If you are really fortunate your entire HS directory may still be intact.

[Rupp]

If you go with HS4 I'd recommend setting up the automated backups so this shouldn't happen again. You can also setup auto cloud backups if you opt for a myHomeSeer Premium Plan. This will save your bacon in cases like these.

[mulu]

One possibility to try. You may still be able to read information off your drive, just not boot from it. Use a caddy to make it a USB external drive and see if you can retrieve any info from it from another computer. (Search for "recover data from a damaged hard drive".) If you are really fortunate your entire HS directory may still be intact.

That's a good point. I did have some limited success recovering a broken HDD before. It's many years ago so I don't recall what software I used. Many of the files were corrupted and many did have incorrect file extensions but I got some of the stuff back. I definitely would give this a try but otherwise safe yourself the time jumping through hoops and then still not getting it quite right. Btw, when I did that I also upgraded my z-wave stick from the 500 series (housing started to fall apart) to the new 700 series.

[mterry63]

Spinrite at Steve Gibson's GRC site is the gold standard for hard drive recovery. You might give it a shot.