Your whole smart home, on a new board, before the coffee gets cold

Key points

Armbian has published a walkthrough of moving a live Home Assistant Supervised installation from a NanoPi R3S LTS to a NanoPi M6 V2. The move used one backup file and took about 30 minutes, and no Z-Wave or Zigbee devices had to be paired again.

Hardware

• The setup started on an Allwinner H5 NanoPi K1 Plus, moved in 2025 to the NanoPi R3S LTS and moved this month to the NanoPi M6 V2.
• Old board: Rockchip RK3566, 4 × Cortex-A55, 2 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC.
• New board: Rockchip RK3588S, 4 × Cortex-A76 plus 4 × Cortex-A55, 8 GB RAM, 64 GB eMMC and an NVMe slot that is still unused.
• Both boards ran Armbian trixie with Home Assistant Supervised.
• The migrated system included a Z-Wave mesh, a Zigbee network, automations and several years of history.

Why no re-pairing is needed

• A full Home Assistant backup includes configuration, dashboards, automations, history and installed apps.
• Armbian ships the same Supervised stack on every board it supports, so a backup restores onto different hardware.
• Z-Wave and Zigbee network data is stored on the USB sticks, so moving the sticks moves the networks.

Migration steps

• On the old device, go to Settings → System → Backups, create a full backup and download the .tar file.
• Write the Armbian Debian Trixie minimal image for the new board to an SD card or eMMC and boot it. Supervised on Armbian works only on Debian Trixie, not on Ubuntu or other Debian releases.
• Give the board a fixed IP address in one of three ways:
• in armbian-config under Network settings,
• by editing Netplan by hand,
• with a DHCP reservation on the router.
• To keep phones, dashboards and automations working unchanged, reuse the old device's IP address, and switch the old device off first to avoid an address conflict.
• Install Home Assistant through armbian-config → Software → Home Automation, or with the command below. The installer sets up Docker, the Supervisor and the OS agent, waits for the web interface to respond, then asks for a reboot.
• Move the Z-Wave and Zigbee sticks to the new board before restoring, so the apps find their hardware on first start.
• Open http://<board-ip>:8123, choose to restore from a backup on the welcome screen and upload the .tar file.
• The restore runs in the background. After Home Assistant restarts, reload the page and log in with the existing account.

armbian-config --cmd HAS001

USB radios

• Home Assistant finds sticks through /dev/serial/by-id/. These names come from the stick itself, so they stay the same on a new board.
• In this move, an Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5 connected through Z-Wave JS with all nodes ready.
• A Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 Dongle Plus was picked up by ZHA with all devices present.
• If a stick was not plugged in before the restore, plug it in and restore only that app from the same backup:

ha backups restore <backup-slug> --app core_zwave_js

After the move

• Create a new backup on the new board once everything works.
• Check that HACS and other custom components loaded, and reinstall any that are missing.

Support

• The Supervised installation method is maintained by the Armbian team and is not officially supported by the Home Assistant project.
• Hardware questions go to the Armbian forum.
• Application problems that also occur on the official Home Assistant OS go to the Home Assistant community.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.