Migrating Home Assistant from Raspberry Pi 400 to Raspberry Pi 500

In early December Raspberry Pi released the Raspberry Pi 500. I had been hoping they would release a 500, I was a big fan of the Raspberry Pi 400. My current Home Assistant setup was a Raspberry Pi 400 with a ZBT-1 (Sky Connect) supplying the Zigbee network. I watched some YouTube videos regarding migrating Home Assistant from one server to another. None of them really covered migrating the Zigbee part. This is the part that worried me most. At worst I would have to repair everything, but that seemed very unlike Home Assistant. These are the steps I followed.

This was my Raspberry Pi 500 order from The Pi Hut.

• Raspberry Pi 500

• Power Supply

• External SSD

• SSD to USB 3.0 Cable for Raspberry Pi

• Make a backup of the original Home Assistant

  • https://www.home-assistant.io/common-tasks/os/#backups

• Download the backup to your local computer

• Now shutdown the original Home Assistant server

  • One of the reasons I bought the new SSD drive was to enable me to keep the old Home Assistant if it went wrong

  • Settings > Top right hand corner > Advanced options > Shutdown system

Home Assistant shutdown menu

• Once it had shutdown, it took a while. I used ping to make it was off. I connected the ZBT-1 (Sky Connect) to the Raspberry Pi 500

• I installed Home Assistant on the new external SSD drive using the Raspberry Pi Imager

• Booted the new Raspberry Pi 500 Home Assistant from the external SSD

• I went through the setup wizard as far getting to the main Home Assistant page

  • The install screen does not automatically refresh. Refresh manual to see if it is ready

  • I DID NOT restore at this point

  • Make sure it is the same version as the version you are migrating from

  • I built my new Home Assistant a few days before I was ready to migrate. I had to update the new one before I did the restore

• At this point you may not know the IP address of the new server. Use the URL below. This will only work if you only have one Home Assistant on your network. If you have more than one then you will need to find the IP address via your router and use that

  • http://homeassistant.local:8123

• The new Home Assistant server should have the same IP address as your old Home Assistant server. The restore will not change the IP address. This is where I had an issue. I changed the IP address, but did not notice that the mask changed to 255.255.255.255. This meant I could not log back into Home Assistant. Make sure the mask is correct. It is normally 255.255.255.0

• Again, use the URL above to log back in

• At this point we can do the restore

  • Settings > System > Backups

    • In the top right hand corner, click the three dots, choose Upload backup

Upload backup option

Full backup restore

Final step to restore

• My backup file was abut 760MB and took about five minutes to restore

• Connection will be lost at this point

• I have HTTPS turned on using Lets Encrypt so at this point I had to go back to my regular URL that I used for the Raspberry Pi 400

• Some of my notifications started to pop up so that looked promising

• I could login as usual

  • The certificate was correct

  • It also remembered my OTP

• The following devices were discovered

Newly discovered devices

• Bluetooth was no surprise

• I added them all

• I wanted to check all my Entities were correct

  • Settings > Devices and services > Integrations

  • There was a Bluetooth error, no surprise. This is the Bluetooth card from the Raspberry Pi 400

Bluetooth error

• The Bluetooth issue was no surprise. The restore had restored the Raspberry Pi 400 Bluetooth adapter

• Click on the Bluetooth Entity. You will see something like this

Bluetooth error from the old Home Assistant server

• Make a note of the bcm number in red. In this case, the one that ends BD:EE

Bluetooth devices

• Click on the the Bluetooth device in the left hand side bar

• Click Bluetooth in the left hand side bar

• You can now use the three dots on the right hand side to delete that Bluetooth adaptor

• I tested my Zigbee devices. All worked fine

  • Light switches

  • Smart plugs

  • Motion sensors etc

• If you do have any errors and even if you do not, then I would recommend a full reboot of the server, not just Home Assistant. It is the exact same steps as the shutdown you performed at the start of this article, but a reboot instead

• The only thing I had to set up was under my account

  • Theme

  • Dashboard order

All in all this migration was painless. Kudos to the Home Assistant team for making this a simple and painless process