Backups

Backups

It is essential to develop a robust backup/recovery strategy for a 'mission critical' system like Home Automation, especially if you are using an embedded device (like Raspberry Pi) which runs of a Micro SD card - these WILL fail eventually.
Fortunately the cost of SSD drives has plummeted recently, these are much more robust than SD cards and you only need a very modest disk for MisterHouse. Also the cost of cloud storage has dropped, so it's a good idea to back up to the cloud.

Proposed strategy

Directory / File	Frequency
your code_dir and web_dir	Daily if you are actively changing them, otherwise weekly
your data_dir	Daily
your data_dir/mh_temp.saved_states	Every few minutes if you are using them to support a slave machine
MisterHouse source (bin.lib etc)	Weekly

In addition to this you should occasionally clone your entire disk to another device so you can recover quickly in the event of a catastrophic failure. There are several guides on the internet on how to do this, e.g. for Windows and for Mac

Object Logs

MisterHouse creates log files for all changes to your items in the following folder structure $data_dir/object_logs/itemname/year/month/day.log. These can easily clog up a small disk system if you have a lot of items, so its essential to have a robust archive system if you do not need to keep them online.