Power failure results in empty pimatic config-file

---

Hi there,

Recently I have had some power failures in my house, which resulted in my raspberry pi being restarted (cold restart).
Normally pimatic should start on boot but the last 2 times this happened, the pimatic config file was totally empty (0 bytes) and therefore it could not start.

I make back-ups manually from time to time so it’s not the biggest issue, but I was wondering: are more people having this issue and do you guys use an automated back-up script?

Ah, I’ve had this last week. Power failure due to a bit too enthousiastic cleaning girlfriend. Config was empty. Until then I did not have any backups, but with a datarecovery tool I managed to get it back. Need to figure out an easy automated way to backup (manual backup is no backup IMHO!)

I just use the mail plugin to mail the config.json once a week.

@incmve said in Power failure results in empty pimatic config-file:

I just use the mail plugin to mail the config.json once a week.

Isn’t this problematic as it contains all passwords in cleartext?

I only once had a complete corruption of the memory card after a plugin went berserk with log output and I didn’t notice it.

A simple button to download the config in the mobile-frontend would already make things a bit easier.

@thex Offcourse
My pimatic isn’t available outside my network and I’m using a Gmail box that I created especially for this.
But my password is not that complex and is only used for pimatic.
Next to that, my laptop sync’s the config once a week with syncback.

I agree it would be nice to just download it from pimatic GUI.
Somewhere on the forum there is a topic, someone made a script to FTP the config elsewhere, you could schedule that or make a button of it.

For now I have crontabbed an sftp action to daily upload the config file + timestamp to my other raspberry pi. Not ideal, but works for now

I have a nightly rsync backup to another server from cron that does a full backup on Sundays of /etc and /pimatic. On weekdays it only does a delta backup.

And yes: I had twice an empty config.json

@Harry-van-der-Wolf said in Power failure results in empty pimatic config-file:

I had twice an empty config.json

Maybe we can also implement some measure as part of pimatic to mitigate the risk of data loss. As far as I know pimatic will always write the config file as a whole. So, we could easily rename the existing file to, say config.json.bak, and then let pimatic create a new file. In many cases the bak file will be the most recent version as pimatic writes the file on shutdown. Rationale: changing a single inode for the directory entry has a lower potential of corruption than writing the whole file. It won’t help, however, if the config file has already been corrupted, previously.

You could also use the same rotating mechanism as is being used for the pimatic-daemon.log files.