Weird Problem With Deleted Flows

General
1

Hey guys,

I am not sure how this happened or what could have caused this, so I will give you the sequence of events.

Two RPis running the same flow, connected to the same network.
I install another RPi running the same image that I made from one of the running RPis.

Upon power up of the new RPi, the resolution was too small, so I had to reset the resolution. Note, that chromium was already started and showing my node-red dashboard.

I change the resolution then reboot.
After reboot, Chromium did not autostart. So I manually opened it.

I was prompted with "Chromium has detected another process running at host (raspberrypi). Would you like to unlock and take control?" I clicked Yes and when I navigated to my dashboard, I was faced with the "Please add some nodes to your dashboard".

Checking the node-red config, the entire flow is gone! Dashboard settings, configuration nodes, everything is gone.

Thinking ok, something happened...I will just copy the flow from my other RPis.

I logged into the other RPis I have running and the same thing. All of the flows are gone!

Any ideas how this could have happened? Luckily, I have a backup, but still...this is kinda scary.

*EDIT: I did find a bug in Chromium, where if you change your hostname it won't open and prompt the user with "The profile appears to be in use...".

2

image

3

maybe related - the default Node-RED flows file is called flows_{hostname}.json - so again if you change the hostname of your pi your flows will look like they have disappeared... you can start Node-RED with the name of the flow file as a parameter - or edit your settings.js file to point at the flow file you wish to use. Or of course you can rename the flow file to match the hostname of the new device.

4

Thanks @dceejay. That seems to be the precise reason. I had just changed the host names on all the RPis.

I was afraid that somehow or another the flows were deleted by the other RPi.