Raspberry Pi as fallback for a NUC setup

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Hello,
I am thinking of migrating my OH setup from Raspbian to a NUC (actually I have a huge mess in my setup so I would rather start from scratch, but thats not the point here).

Right now I have a spare Raspberry in my shelf, just in case the productive Raspberry fails (hardware). “Commercially” this is not a big thing, less than 100€.
With a NUC an entire spare setup is much more expensive, so I wonder if I can transfer - in case of a NUC failure - the NUC setup (=openHAB installation, bindings, persistance,…) back to a Raspberry compatible SD card, and continue there (with reduced performance, of course).

I don’t want to gather too much details here, it is just a general question: is this possible, to…

  1. create an SD-card with a clean Raspbian
  2. retrieve the SSD from the NUC
  3. restore the most recent backup from the SSD to the RPi (I assume that the backups include the things that were configured via GUI)
  4. use the RPi until the NUC is fixed or replaced

Of course both setups should be based on the same OH release.

Good idea?
Or should I keep a second NUC as spare?

Thanks
Phil

2

Once you get your eventually messed up setup right, it will run flawlessly on RPi. No need for more performance.
So why mess with a NUC at all?
With 2 RPi you can simply swap boxes in case of need. With NUC+RPi you are needlessly creating all sorts of problems, synchronization being a major but not the only one of those. Don’t.

3

Sure.

It’s going to be a lot of work and somewhat brittle. You can’t just make a copy of the SSD and burn it to an SD and expect it to work. For one the processor of your NUC and the RPi is not the same so the binaries won’t be compatabile.

openhab-cli backups include all your OH settings no matter how they are made. They do not contain any third party settings or data though.

If you need a spare, sticking with RPi is going to be by far the easiest route to go. If you want to use NUC I’d look into something like Proxmox with auto-failover or the like. Mixing NUC and RPi is, IMO, going to be way more work than is worth it.

4

Or buy a second hand SFF computers from ebay (they come complete with SSD and RAM). They could be cheaper than a Pi. Dell, Lenovo, HP.

3 Likes
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All,
thanks for your input.
I forgot to mention, that I was looking to use Proxmox at the NUC.

My scenariao would be: productive OH at the NUC, with regular backups via “openhab-cli backup” (this is what I already do on the actual Pi), eventually copied to a NAS.
The RPi has an actual but “blank” OH installation, same release as at the NUC

When the NUC fails I take the most recent backup (from the NAS) and restore it at the RPi.

My (mechanical engineer) heart tells me to stick with the RPi, due to the easy replacement possibility (a RPi is a RPi is a RPi; swap SD card and you’re done), and stay away from the NUC (do I realy need the performance, and am I willing to deal with a more delicate setup (as seen from a mech eng))…
Dealing with the “SD card wear” issue can be covered by replacing it with a RPi compatible SSD.

Thanks again,
Phil

6

thanks, thats a valuable information, enhances my sleep :slight_smile:
I am kind of old-school, I like text based setups, but sometimes I can’t avoid the GUI :wink:

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Everything you do in the GUI gets saved as text.

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And you’re even giving the prime reasons yourself.

Better use ZRAM and SD mirroring. That’s what they were built for.