My openhab server crashed recently, fatal disk error and it would not boot. I’m using InfluxDB for persistance and although i was able to recover from backup, i lost about 5 days of data (weekly backup, crashed on day 6….)
However i could still access most of the filesystem bar a few files on the old SD card. So i wanted to recover any missing data. Here’s how i did it:
- Copy the contents of
/var/lib/influxdb
from the old filesystem to$HOME/.influxdb
on the new filesystem. This should include data, meta and wal folders. - Export the data i wanted, tailoring the database name and start date as needed:
influx_inspect export -database openhab -start 2025-08-10T04:00:00+00:00
- Note that
influx_inspect export
defaults to looking in$HOME/.influxdb
hence my copying the files there. The result is a file calledexport
in the same folder. - Now i can import the data into my new Openhab Influx database:
influx -import -path=$HOME/.influxdb/export
- Finally, i can remove all the backup files.
rm -Rf $HOME/.influxdb/*
Surprisingly this worked!