Because (1) Sense units can occasionally fail and must be replaced, (2) Sense will eventually release an evolved unit with additional features, and (3) the device’s knowledge of a user’s household - which may take a year or more to accrue and resolve - represents a significant investment of time, I think it is essentual for you to add a simple way for a user to locally backup and restore that information.
Ideally, it could be set to periodically auto-backup a snapshot of all data necessary for a user to restore & resume with a replacement unit from a backup point.
I know this will be a dull feature to task one of your engineers with developing, but I feel the lack of a way to save and restore state - considering the Sense unit’s evolution in other areas - is a glaring usability flaw. I would be very unhappy if my Sense unit failed and I had to start again from zero with a replacement.
Having voluntarily replaced my Sense unit this past April after a couple years of operation, I’m all for ways to gracefully transition between hardware units. But I think it is more complex than you think, because all the data you enter into Sense is already stored/saved on the cloud. That’s why you are able to make changes in naming in the phone app and see the data hot-updated in the web app (and vice versa), under your account.
The real trick is to gracefully swap in a new device under the same account, keeping all the things you want to keep, customizing the stuff required for your new device (i.e. calibration), and jettisoning the things you don’t want for your new device, as long as you don’t do things that would cause problems for Sense’s back-end. I, for instance, wanted to do a clean restart (no detected devices or pre-existing models linked to my device), keep my old data visible to me, but would have loved to have the “device inventory” (not in existence yet), available to me. But there are so many connections between the actual detected devices, the associated models/training, and possibly the Sense device itself (does changing the Sense hardware slightly alter the models). What good is keeping the existing detected devices if the new Sense hardware is going to detect a whole set of new devices with new names.
In short:
Sense already saves all this data
What’s needed is a way to install a new monitor on an existing account
But Sense will likely need to make the call on what comes over and what doesn’t to ensure best results.