I went back to working on the home automation migration today – and made a little progress, despite my best efforts.
I’ve installed Home Assistant and Insteon-MQTT in Docker containers on my Raspberry Pi. Once I have everything operational, that’ll be great – it’s easy to update the software to a more recent version without messing up my configuration. But right now, it’s a pain because it’s not easy to see the actual code that’s running in the container.
Today, I wanted to check to see if the code that I was running had the most recent fixes applied – so I copied it into my configuration directory, which is shared with the actual computer so I can use an editor to look at it.
I didn’t want to keep the extra copy of the code around, so I issued the Unix delete-everything command: rm -rf *. Unfortunately, I was in the wrong directory, and I deleted my entire configuration. Which I hadn’t backed up.
Most of the files in the directory were created by the software, but there was one file that I had had to edit by hand to include information about all of my devices. I wasn’t looking forward to doing that, but I saw no alternative.
I opened my other text editor – it already had one window open, and I was delighted to see that the configuration file was there – so I saved it where it WILL be backed up, then got back to work and got another few automations converted.
Progress!