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I have a bunch of files I need to move from one hard drive to another for boring reasons, and am wondering if this is a good time to finally rebuild my home server. I have an Intel NUC plus a Synology NAS for storage, and I mostly just run #Plex and #HomeAssistant.
With Home Assistant, I’ve been a bit annoyed with the Docker image not supporting some of the add-ons you can use if you use Home Assistant OS. I wonder if I should run that directly on the NUC, and then Plex on the NAS? 🤔
I don’t know for sure but it would make sense that plex might have better performance with physical access to the drives that hold the media as well.
The migration is not too complex but it will require some work but the upside is you'd keep your existing Plex install as is and then get the benefit of a Home Assistant VM install
Maybe I misread this, but Plex runs fine as app on Synology NAS. It depends a bit on the NAS if you require transcoding. Synology is prone to use outdated hardware, even in the newest generations.
Did you check if HA OS supports the Hardware, especially the graphic card for transcoding. Or, the CPU if 8t can do x264/h265 transcoding
Hope you document this journey. I’m hoping to build my own system in a similar vein soon. (Once my networking closet setup is finished.)
Note: I am not (and do not want to be!) a sysadmin. I’ve been running the same Ubuntu server install for something like five years, upgraded several times. Plex is currently installed as a Snap, which had been working fine for years until it recently filled the OS disk with thumbnails. Home Assistant is running on the same install via Docker, which I manually update every month or so when there are new releases. More than anything, I would like it all to be as hands-off as possible.
I’m also currently exposing this server to the Internet so I can access it remotely (and I’d previously thought about hosting my website from it), but I pay for Home Assistant Cloud through Nabu Casa and am happy to use tailscale for anything else.
I’m also currently running Homebridge (I think as a package from their PPA?), which I think I can replace with my Starling Home Hub and/or use as an add-on with HA OS.
I think that’s “all” the machine is doing these days…
Update: files have been copied. The NAS has been reset. Plex has been installed directly on the NAS and is now doing all of its media analysis and database building. I probably could have figured out how to directly migrate my existing Plex install, but starting fresh is kinda nice.
The next (and more painful) step will be to reset the NUC and set up Home Assistant OS. Maybe during the day when nobody else is home is a good time to do that? 🤔
Does anyone in my circles have experience migrating a Home Assistant install*? I have backups and nothing is mission critical if I had to redo it, but it would be annoying to have to set things like automations and dashboards back up. But those *should* be safe with my multiple backups in different locations…
I'm just wondering what I should look out for. I'm nervous lol
*I’m specifically going from a container on Ubuntu to Home Assistant OS on the same hardware, with MQTT
I did the migration today during my lunch. It’s true, it was practically seamless and everything is now back to how it was (or better!). The only things that weren’t 100% automagic were containers I was running on the same machine: an MQTT server and Homebridge for some devices that were previously pulled in via HomeKit.
For MQTT, I installed the add-on and then was prompted to reauth which worked perfectly. So no issues there.
For Homebridge, I actually replaced it with a Starling Home Hub I’ve had for a while. I was using it for Nest devices; it supports local video streams and more entities like the Nest Protect motion sensors, and exposes that all over HomeKit. Since they added broad Google Home to HomeKit bridging, I can just use the couple of other couple of devices via it as well.
@cassidy I moved my HA instance from a VM on my Synology to an LXC on Proxmox. Just installed the HA, restored the backup and I was good.
As for HAOS I have enjoyed using HACS since all of them support HAOS best.
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