I have ran Home Assistant in my house for about 6 years, and for a tinkerer who likes to keep things local, is has been great fun! A few quick suggestions:
- Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage!
- Play around with devices, but be picky about what you use long term
- Communicate with your spouse/other people in the house before experimenting :)
After some crashes and hard lessons, I now run HA on a Proxmox that has two boot drives and regular snapshots/backups of the VM. This adds enough redundancy to keep things running and avoid a dark house if a disk breaks down. With great power comes great responsibility!
> - Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage!
You should post why. It could be that you don’t know to buy endurance cards for wear levelling? Or you do and that’s still not good enough? Or something else entirely. Basically I can’t tell if you know more or less than I do from just the statement.
I suspect they are referring to using a Raspberry Pi and using a micro SD card as the main storage mechanism. This is known to be a bad combination that will fail at an unfortunate time, sooner rather than later.
Personally I boot my Raspberry's using netboot (DHCP via dnsmasq) and NFS. However I don't run Home Assistant on a Raspberry, it runs on the "server" (headless machine) that's serving NFS .
Sorry, I'll expound: I used a high quality endurance card, and it worked fine for a few years, until it didn't :)
The SDcard started failing when I was on a prolonged Christmas holiday – and Home Assistant was responsible for keeping my house above freezing temps when it was below -10℃ outside. Luckily I have nice neighbors who helped me out!
Anyway, I had planed to move HA away from the rPi3 for a while, but you know how it is, more important things keep happening, so this crash forced my hand.
SDcards are a gamble, especially in a device you want to keep running for years and years. I feel much better having it running om my Proxmox with dual boot disks and regular backups, so WHEN a disk is calling quits, it still keeps on working and I have time to replace the broken disk.
- Do NOT use a device with a micro SDcard as the main storage!
- Play around with devices, but be picky about what you use long term
- Communicate with your spouse/other people in the house before experimenting :)
After some crashes and hard lessons, I now run HA on a Proxmox that has two boot drives and regular snapshots/backups of the VM. This adds enough redundancy to keep things running and avoid a dark house if a disk breaks down. With great power comes great responsibility!