And then… my raspberry π crashed (x_x)

The stability of my Raspberry Pi that I use for the project Temperature Monitor is not what is should be. Sometimes it simply stops and I need to reboot the RPi to fix it, but somewhere in November a simple reboot did not work. I was able to open Grafana but it didn’t showed any new data. So I opened a ssh session only to find out that Python no longer functioned!

Pyhton.status = x_x

The same counted for some other critical functions like apt and or journalctl, but… Grafana and InflixDB still worked. The data was intact and fortunately I still had a second RPi-Zero that I had used to document the
Temperature Monitor Project. Today I found the time to move all the data from RPi to RPi.

Back-up Move and Restore

First steps. Backing up the data and moving it to the other side was surprisingly easy:

influxd backup -portable /home/pi/influxdb-bckup_20191219a
rsync -avz influxdb-bckup_20191219a pi@<ipOfTheOtherRPi:/home/pi/

The second step, restoring the data was a little bit harder. The command itself is simple:

influxd restore -portable influxdb-bckup_20191219a

But unfortunately I received the error:

error updating meta: DB metadata not changed. database may already exist
restore: DB metadata not changed. database may already exist

The documentation learned that this is expected behaviour as the DB already existed in this RPi. So before I could restore it I needed to drop the DB.

influx -username admin -password <removed>
Connected to http://localhost:8086 version 1.7.7
InfluxDB shell version: 1.7.7
> DROP DATABASE temperature
> exit

After that I was able to restore the DB running the command above. Now if you want to merge 2 db’s together, you can do this by using a temporary db. For that I refer to the documentation page of InfluxDB

Conclusion

This project is far from finished. I still need to configure the backup and also move it all to a nice pcb. But on the bright side. The data is moved for a regular RPi to a zero one and the last one is using less power.

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