This post started off because I had an issue with my HC2 and I had to do a recovery. There was a lot of great suggestions from many people including @Sankotronic, @RH_Dreambox, @Jamie mccrostie, @jimicr, @tinman, @petergebruers, @Bodyart, @Rafael Suarez, @DAWO  so I decided to turn it into a [INFO] Recovery and Backup/Restore type post. If I have any part wrong or misleading please let me know and I'll edit .

This is not an absolute guide and not meant to be solution but more of a structured way to document what worked for me and what was shared as I worked through the process. I've pulled it all into the first post should some of it be useful to other forum users.

**Trying any of this should be your judgement call when you weigh up your specific situation and risks** 

Some general comments that I found helpful 

• HC2 will power on without the recovery stick in the USB slot. The HC2 runs perfect, but you can't make or restore backups. The boot process runs from an internal drive. 
• HC2 RECOVERY boots from stick and that's where your backups are.
• Z-wave led (4th from left) shold flicker and is rarely solidly 'on'
• IDs are unlimited. Number of physical devices (with a Z-Wave chip) talking to each other in one network is 232 (if you need more, you need extra controllers). But scene IDs and device IDs are unlimited.
• As of 4.120 all custom icons after a recovery will NOT show in the Web UI but show okay on Android Phone, Andoid Tablet and iOS iPad.

• In case restore was necessary to fix zwave / modules not configured and / or other zwave related things (which might happend e.g. after firmware update) then definitely do "yes" to purge zwave database. After restore, all modules will get anyway recognized. you might do run soft reconfiguration to get latest templates

• Sometimes it takes a while after entering recovery for HC IP to connect, @Jamie mccrostie had to wait 5 to 10 minutes until it would reconnect. Up to that it just said something like "device unavailable" with a white browser screen even though all three leds on the front panel are back up

• Try and not have too many backups - The unofficial advice from Fibaro Support was to only keep between 4 and 6 backup versions. I had 50 backups at one stage consuming 74% of storage and I started to see performance issues.

• After recovery, please go to each device's "Advanced" page and click on "Read configuration", then, after a few seconds, refresh the page. Start with mains powered devices. What happened, during recovery, is this: some devices have been reconfigured (and parameters get default values). Then, the database was restored. Now, the contents of the database and the parameters stored on the device are no longer in sync. If you still have one device that doesn't act as expected, please try it. After "Read configuration" you'll see that the (refreshed) parameters page explains/matches its behavior 

HC2 IP address

Backup seemed to go on a bit longer than expected.

power down HC2 using power button

 - I didn't pull out the plug but the next time I would (after I had completed an orderly shutdown using the button)  

I would then power back up and see if the UI came available. 

If not then you may need to take the recovery route (Which is what I had to do) 

Recovery and Restore steps I found worked for me

Power down system using power button, unplug HC2 briefly)

hold recovery button (button next to power button)

press power button (and keep holding recovery button)

When the first led on front of HC2 ( on the right side ) stays on solid release the recovery button

back to browser - clear cache, wait about 20 seconds for recovery mode to activate

open up UI at IP address (if usual IP address doesn't work search for HC2 using Fing or something similar)

Recovery screen will be displayed

Select Recovery (first box on left)

Reset Zwave

- Click no if you want to keep your devices and restore on top of that 

- Click Yes if you want to clear everything. All devices will be added back in if you have a good backup available

Let recovery complete and it will reboot

Close browser and clear cache and open browser at IP address 

If IP address has changed use Fing again to find

My HC recovered to 4.036 (which is pre wizard and email logins)

Open browser and login using admin/admin

All your devices wont be there but ignore that for now

Select upgrade to 4.120 (which is the latest fw for me when this happended)

Allow the upgrade to complete

close browser and clear cache

try and login using admin/admin but if this doesn't work you could try the wizard. 

Reopen browser and you may find your email login doesn't work (if you try and generate a new password - this wont work either as your email wont be recognised)

Activate the wizard (not sure how I did this)

Complete the required steps (email, password and confirmation code sent to email)

Log into Web UI using email and password just created during wizard

The system is now at 4.120 but doesn't have your setup

Now go to the backups/restore section in the UI and select a backup to restore (I selected the second last one mainly because I had a suspicion that something went won't with my last backup)

let this restore complete

close browser, clear cache and log in

All should be okay, give the system the once over

depending on how old your last backup was you may need to reinstate the changes you made between the backup you restored and now

I had two issues at this stage but just minor 

  1) All my custom icons were missing (this was expected)

  2) Some of my fibaro dimmers (dimmer 1) had parameter 14 (switch type) a bit messed up and I had to fix.

Another post about a Factory Reset

As many of you know I'm developing UHAS (Universal Home Automation System) for Fibaro Home Center 2. This is complex system that should make Fibaro users life easier and give them decent HA without needing to dig into the programming in LUA and also should support 27 different languages with automatic translation of VD's. I use that same system on my HC2 and till firmware 4.140 it was working great. System was responsive and even CPU usage was a bit elevated it was not making my box sweating.

After introduction of FW 4.170 everything fall apart. That system was first to introduced lags in the system and also CPU usage get more wild. It was first FW that FORCED me to make complete RECOVERY due to never ending "Starting services". Before 4.170 all problems could be solved by either rebooting or restoring latest backup.

Latest betas 4.503 and 4.504 continue to make HC2 less good but introduced new backup system. To make story short, new firmware upgrades are making HC2 less capable but in the same time new backup is introduced that will make it possible to restore it to another gateway.

This looks to me like Fibaro is trying to copycat Apple. Apple practice is to introduce new updates to older devices that usually make them slow and annoying forcing users to buy new devices. Is Fibaro trying to do the same?

My experience in short with my system (HC2 with 101 included z-wave devices:

• 4.080 - started to develop UHAS since first preliminary tests proved that this is doable
• 4.100 - Introduced icon problems so had to rewrite UHAS code that handle that part
• 4.120 - found problem in UHAS code that could make gateway stuck with API calls due to way how HC2 was handling non existing icons in VD's. Problem could be experienced only after recovery when icons are deleted and backup is restored
• 4.140 - More than 50 UHAS compatible VD's and almost 20 UHAS compatible scenes are running smoothly on this system with slightly elevated CPU and memory usage. System runs for more than a month without any problems.
• 4.170 - Same UHAS configuration as on 4.140 is making CPU usage berserk (crazy, more elevated) and lags are introduced to system. Lags are of different length, from 1 to 60 seconds. All z-wave activity is stacked in memory and can be seen happening on GUI but with delay. So it is not z-wave that has lags, but system is not capable of reading all z-wave activity so it is stacked in buffer and then read with lags.
• 4.180 - same as 4.170. This one should only solve remote connection problem introduced with 4.170
• 4.503b - more resources are eaten by the system leaving UHAS less space to work. CPU usage is so crazy and jumping so much that I don't even believe it any more. lags in the system get worse or at least was not solved. Also introduced some new debugging like API: Not found etc. which definitely introduced more problems to LUA execution speed. I have completely rebuild my z-wave network on this FW to avoid any trouble caused by older z-wave devices. I can tell you that Fibaro motion sensor 2.8 and D?W sensor version 2.5 are not properly included in this FW
• 4.504b - All the same. System can became completely unusable due to long lags in the system where z-wave is responsive but system is getting all z-wave activity with lag.

At the moment I have no idea what to do next. I have freshly builded HC2 with included 101 z-wave devices with some decent code but doesn't work! Fibaro what is your next move?

We need feedback about time synchronization and drifting.

Some of you confirmed that there was a slight improvement with 4.136, but this has not solved the issue completely.

How about 4.140 and 4.141?

Please, state the version of your system in your posts and how much the time is drifting or if it is not drifting at all.

Thanks!

1. Perform a configuration backup,
2. Reboot HC2 (logic: flush out non-visible stuffs such as abnormalities, cache, hung processor threads, etc),
3. Sanity Check for 5-15 minutes (logic: reboot usually boots up fine but just in case of unforeseeable abnormal behaviour),
4. Proceed to firmware update,
5. Clear web browser cache,
6. Terminate web browser,
7. Relaunch web browser,
8. Repeat step 5-7 if firmware update still in progress,
9. Change Freeze for 1 hour (logic: allows non-visible backend scripts/processes to complete any conversions, system changes, etc that the new firmware has to perform).

All credit goes to @chaicka. Thanks!

We apologize for such a delay of our reply in the matter of the Dimmer 2 product. We had to be sure how we should approach the situation and the demand for solution of the issue.

First of all, we would like inform all of our users that the effect of flickering is not a malfunction of our product. It is an effect that results from a way how electric installation work in specific countries.

Second of all, our product has been certified by official institutions and our products abide by required norms in countries where they are being sold. You can find the Declaration of Conformity and IECEE CB Scheme attached. Declarations of Conformity of our products can be found at manuals.fibaro.com

Furthermore, it was mentioned that CE certificate states that our product has to be immune to ripple control. It is not true. This certificate states that electronic products must not be the cause of ripple control and must not emit any signal interfering the electric installation. Nevertheless, we would like to highlight that we tested our product for external interference and our product passed the tests accordingly to current norms.

Finally, our products have all necessary documentation and certification required so comments that selling of our products should be stopped and certification recalled are simply unfounded. We assured you all that we work hard to minimize the effect that you all are struggling with. At the moment, we are testing the solution that reduced the flickering significantly in lab environment. We will perform further tests in more “natural” environment to be 100% sure that this solution is effective.

Sincerely,

FIBARO Team

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