Would be good to have a video (maybe a short) showing the restore process, in case your SD card is corrupted, what to do? As your HA is not working anymore how to restore from a brand new SD ?
Really appriciate the care for explaining details and making sure people check it's working, don't forget their password and even have a backup stale notification. Great work!
Great video for taking backups. But restoring from backup seems like a bigger lift and challenge. How about giving us a 2nd video showing how you actually go about testing your backups. Do you restore to a 2nd Home Assistant instance or do you restore to your production box?
Thank you! When I first started using Home assistant, I had no need for a backup because it hardly did anything for me. Over the years, HA has slowly become more and more integral in life and now I'm realizing I do need the backup. I don't have a NAS at the moment so I am just using the Google Drive backup for now.
This is what I have been wanting for a long time. Great tutorial. Man did I ever get look from my SO about "when your house isn't working". Lets just say been in that scenario a few times .
Good stuff. Thanks. Could you please consider to create pt.2 of this video walking through a restore on a different device? The use case would be the current HA server hardware fails, and you want to get up an running again on current hardware. Thanks!
Just did the same thing the other day. One issue I hit was I couldn't connect to my Synology shared drive. After much digging I found I had to set the "Minimum SMB protocol" to SMB2 and "Maximum SMB protocol" to SMB3 in the Synology SMB advanced Settings. After that it worked flawlessly
Thank you so much for your videos, they are very inspiring. I'm a newbie and I've only had home assistant for 2 weeks, but your videos have sped up the setup and design of it many times over. Only my wife minds that I sit in front of the computer all day 🙂
Oh you just wait, once you have a zigbee bridge/stick - the next thing you know is configuring entire wizardry of automations across 37 lights 15 switches 11 sensors, diy smart speakers managed by the incredible music assistant add on, etc.
Would love a video on what hardware you are currently running across your whole setup. I.E what you are running HA on, your storage etc. Love the videos
Thank You, after a scare last nite of HA not wanting to start after an update, and fearing the NVME storage drive i use on by HA pi had been corrupted this is a welcome add on. I did get it restarted and spent this morning looking for a backup (off pi) solution, and this fits the bill PERFECTLY
I use the OneDrive integration which works good. It can be set to keep a certain number of backups and deletes the old ones, I have it set to do two backups per day and keep 5 backups. If you are using NAS, it deletes backups from there. It also installs a sensor which you can use to monitor backups and use in automations etc.
@@TonyGauderman I am curious why it is important to be able to restore a HA backup from months/years ago? The backup is generally used for disaster recovery or moving to a new system, not for keeping audit trails of business records.
I have my HA as a VM on a Synology NAS. Through BTRFS I create daily snapshots. This allows for long retention backups which do not use much space. Restore takes a few minutes. Done it several times, especially after power outages before my UPS.
I do this exact same setup. Moment I heard this was now I thing I did it straight away. You never know when you need a backup. It's the worst feeling ever when you don't have a recent one or they don't work for some reason.
Was excited about the NAS build in support. But yes the main feature missing is deleting old backups. Wanted to stay away from the big cloud companies and also thirdparty integrations (but actually did know that you can manage backups in the gdrive integration and not use gdrive), so I worked for my own solution: I just created a new share for Backups on my Synology NAS which already has a 3-2-1 backup solution, so far nothing new or special :). But to cleanup my backups regualary I created a small python script which iterates over the backup tars, keeping a number of full backups and for partial backups (like when updating an addon updates) they will be kept for a specific number of days. Other will be deleted. This script I just added to in my NAS scheduler to be run daily informing me via email when there is a problem while cleaning.
Didn’t he just mention the google drive backup feature automatically deletes the old backup from your local nas as well. My only question here would be security related I mean how are the backups being deleted from my nas , is it HA doing it up or is it the google drive integration able to access my shared folder on my nas which I think is not a secure way to do it
good timing, by coincidence I used the new network storage feature for backups on my Unraid setup this morning but was trying to create an automation for the backups but not very intuitive. followed your guide and added the Google drive function and local backup option and much better, thanks..
I had been using Google Drive integration for offsite backups for a long time. This new share mount functionality in Home Assistant is something I had been waiting for years to come to fruition. I know there were hacks, but I never got them to work reliably. This allows me now to have a proper backup system, and also to mount the share for my CCTV system into Home Assistant. It makes a lot of the add-ons that use storage a lot more useable. If you are ever thinking of NAS mount videos, maybe one to show how to use the new NAS Mount options in something like Plex or Frigate could be helpful? Thanks for all your hard work!
This is of course all completely correct and it’s great that there is now another backup possibility - thank you as always Lewis for sharing this. My problem is that when I lost everything, the Google cloud backup has just not worked, giving me back only a tiny bit of what had been saved. Still struggling to see if there is any way to get the full restore back. For a non computer guy, despite some online help, this has so far been impossible. Of course it is possible I did something to corrupt the back ups, but not sure how.
I had to do a Restore, as my HA crashed (my fault). Ended up reflashing my boot SSD with HA image, during boot up I was prompted with option to restore so pointed HA to my *****.tar backups folder. Restore commenced but seemed to hang for hours (seems it does ie no progress bar) I rebooted HA and left it for 10 minutes as it seemed to be doing stuff! I then logged in remotely and great news it was back up and running. It was this YT that I followed to set up the Backups and it worked in anger. Thanks.
Thank you for the video. Perhaps Noob but the name in the top of the network storage form needs to be the exact same as the Share one makes. Don’t ask me how I found out. Also thanks for no music in the background. Helps in the focus of it all 😂
My Home Assistant blue crashed after an update. I had backuped up after each update of Home assistant OS and after major automation or devices additions. I failed to backup the Odroid! I;m not tech oriented(plug and play is basically all I can do), but I do know that the ip address of my Odroid on my router is 'offline'. My point is, this video you just released is appropriate for my life in real time since my new Odroid M1 has just been delivered! Thank you.
This is great information, thanks! I will at least add 1 backup location for the short term. BUT, this also lead to big dillema's though. Namely: 1 My main NAS for backups is not on the IoT network, but seperated, for security. So... I need a second NAS, extra complexity, costs, energy use... 2 We should strive to stay away from cloud services and (too) big tech companies as much as we can. Being on RU-vid is already bad enough. Still _a_ backup is better than having _no_ backup.
Nice tutorial Lewis! I run my HA in a VM and regularly snapshot it and then roll those off as backups but for those on bare metal this is a great way to achieve some security. It wasn't mentioned, but I'm assuming that the Google plugin isn't encrypting the backups before storing them so a password is the only way to add any security? I'm wondering if backup from the NAS would be a better way to achieve the same (though a bit more complex to set up) since you could deduplicate, encrypt or whatever else before you push it up to the NSA... I mean Google :) Actually, why bother? If you lose you HA instance just contact the NSA for a restore ;)
i'm not wild about that google drive thing, and i can't do the nas thing yet because i'm still waiting for the harddisks i ordered. but when they arrive, i'll want to use that nas for more than just backups. i want home assistant to store its data on the nas and have access to my media files which will also be on the nas.
Great Lewis that has stopped me having to manually transfer my Google Drive backups to my Synology NAS. This video prompted me to think of an Idea for a video for you. In my experience with HomeAssistant the reason why I have had to re-install a backup has almost always been beacuse I did something wrong. I have considered having a development instancxe of HomeAssistant that would allow me to test before moving it into "production". My HA instance is on Proxmox so i could easily creat another instance but not sure how I would handle for example the Zigbee co-ordinator or MQTT. Could you do a video on the options for running a development HA instance?
Hello; I enjoy following your videos. I'm new. I am experiencing a power outage in my area. Yes, I use it with argon one m.2 nvme. What do I need to do to have HA automatically turn on again after a power outage? Thank you.
I was excited about the built in NAS support until I realised I don't even need it in my setup. Home Assistant is running in a Docker Container. The volume is on an NFS Share on my TrueNAS Server. The Server then takes Snapshots and syncs all my files to my Google Drive Account.
Can you please tell us where the backups go when we first install on Home Assistant Green so at least we can find them and put them in a different location
I used Google Backup in the past, but it wasn't really reliable and I would have needed to buy more backup space too for a good backup retention system. But my biggest problem were unreliable uploads. I use now Samba Backup, there I have a backup on my HA rig and the other one on my Synology NAS. All backups are automatically uploaded to the NAS and I can have a good retention system for my backups. Even different ones locally on HA and on my NAS. That system I use now for nearly a year and it works perfectly and I could even rebuild my HA easily once, after my first try to go from ZHA to ZigBee2MQTT failed. The Google Backup Addon isn't bad, but I had problems with it. Those problems came up after using it about 2-3 month. I had backups missing on my Google drive and that is a no go.
I've never really had issues with it after using it for almost 2 years now, perhaps the connection is the issue? But in your case now you have backups in the same household and 2 of your copies are on the same machine it seems like?
@@EverythingSmartHome I have one backup file on the HA PC and a copy of it will be uploaded to my Synology NAS. If I wanted to, I could upload my Synology NAS also into cloud space. I keep 30 days on the HA and 60 on the NAS. A backup is made every day at night.
Is there any way to backup to Local AND NAS AND Google Drive? My NAS is sometimes a bit flakey so I would like the local copy as well as the NAS... but I only see option for one or the other
mate I just followed your guide on duck dns and got as far as pasting the two lines in the config and checking that it doesnt affect reboot..it said it wouldnt affect it so hit restart but now I get "this page isnt working" so any advice would help got back up on google cloud but not sure what to do any help would be appreciated..thank you !
ok, I thnk I am missing something or have fallen at the first hurdle. Navigating to "Settings --> Systems" on my newly updated HA 2023.7.2, I do not see anything for "Storage" :(. I don't if this is because I use the HA docker.....
an iCloud integration would be great as I don't want to give Google any of my data I don't have to (and Apple does e2e encryption in iCloud now), but I realise due to Apple's security standards this will probably never happen, so instead I use an SMB share on a Macbook and Apple Shortcuts to do a similar thing, but I use a different backup integration that allows for deletion as well.
When you go to backups, Click the three dots and select change default backup location... It seems it was set to the new drive already. The save button is grayed out.
please help me, after midnight home assistant keeps disconnecting the connection to my PC at 30 minute intervals, how do I solve it? I use Fritbox as a router
I'm very new to all this but don't seem to be able to set this up, I don't seem to have a 'Storage' option under System. Can anyone help me understand why. I have HA running on a raspberry pi 4.
I’m running Supervised on Debian 11 and it tells me “The operating system does not support network storage Network storage is not supported on this host”
@@lookabout I did this: Edit /usr/sbin/hassio-supervisor file changing the following line -v ${SUPERVISOR_DATA}:/data:rw \ to -v ${SUPERVISOR_DATA}:/data:rw,slave \ Then rebooted my homeassistant server. It was accessible.
I welcome the network storage addition but, to me, Home Assistant backups are a p.i.a at the best of times. I've long since move on from them and have been running HA as a VM under Proxmox for quite a while now. All I do is back up the whole VM. If it dies, restoring the VM from backup is much quicker than the HA backup/restore process. If my Proxmox box craps the tin all I have to do is restore the VM to any other working Proxmox server (I have four.) Again, this takes just a few minutes. My HA VM is backed up to a USB HDD in the host Proxmox server and over an NFS share to TrueNAS (also a VM on a different Proxmox server) and to the cloud. No grief, no heartache... and I haven't even moved to high availability Proxmox clustering yet, but it's coming.
Backup filenames on my Synology NAS are different (8 alfanumeric digits) from those uploaded to Google Drive (where filename is actually the one defined in the addon template). Any one with the same issue?
When you say NAS, my router has a USB plugin that I can use for storage, configurable for both media and files. My question is, will HA recognize that as a NAS? Probably need to check that for myself, but I'm out on vacation.
My H.A. runs on a virtual machine (virtualbox), I don't use H.A. backups at all, just snapshot ne VM, and have it copy the latest to the cloud. I never had to use this backup though, so the question is, it it good enough?
Running Unraid with HA in Docker is also super easy to backup. CA Backup plugin creates a backup into a share, and that share is coincidentally a MEGA share (could be Dropbox or something else). The MEGA share is also synced to the Unraid HDD, so I essentially have two backups (one off-site and one on the HDD in the Unraid server), although the Unraid "backup" is cheating, as it's stored on the same device as HA is. But, the off-site backup is nice.
I have a Synology Nas and for the life of me. I cannot get it to work with your instructions. I I know the IP address of the storage location. I know the username and password but I cannot get this to work.
Is there a specific setting to have in the share folder on the NAS except the right to write and read of the user used ? I am not able to proceed and got an error that says unable to mount the folder? The process looks so simple that I should have missed something. On the other hand I used the samba share add on without problem for my backup on my NAS. So I should miss something.
For me it was a my network configuration causing the issue. If you have your smart home in a vlan you might need to make a firewall rule if your NAS and smart home are not on the same network.
Used Google Drive backup for a long time and recently found Samba backup which worked well for local NAS backups. One thing I did struggle with, is the restoration of MariaDB. I've since read it can be a PITA to backup correctly (they suggest stopping MariaDB to back it up, although its now not meant to be a problem). I basically couldn't restore my backup properly and in the end managed it by having a fresh install, installed MariaDB but didnt start it, partial restored the backup with just MariaDB and HA config then restored the other add-ones. Was not pretty! Would be good if anyone has any tips/tricks to restore backups with MariaDB. Also had issues with Node-Red and Zigbee2MQTT. Hopefully I dont have to do it again for a while! Thought I'd lost all my energy data!
I recently decided to switch from TrueNAS Scale to unRAID on box #1. So to be sure my backups would work i rolled a HAOS VM on box #2 which is already running unRAID. I tried to import my backup but i keep getting an error and no automations, integrations, nor settings import. It would have been helpful if you would have included this final step in your tutorial. I'm not sure what could be wrong with my test setup.
@@EverythingSmartHome Disregard. User error. In my Google Backup add-on I must have specified a password or ... something ... not sure. Instead, in the native Settings/Backups screen I manually created a backup with no password - saved it, shut down the main HA instance, booted up the new HA instance, uploaded the 'test' backup, restored it, and all seems well now. Thanks for your concern and reply, Lewis!
just tried this cant even go to the 1st step... i go to setting>storage and cant find the network storage, is there something i need to do first before it will appear?
I backup to my unraid server and cloud account! Backup server is still being built for offsite out of state..... Think I may change over to this method. Like the automations too. I never thought to check the backups. Hmm.. time to spin up a vm and see if mine work. I tend to do a full backup before I update as well as download the back up to my desktop. Been burned by too many HA updates and esphome updates.
@@EverythingSmartHomeYeah I'm aware. I know HA supports SMB1. Can be done by using a shell command but I was hoping to keep everything in the UI. Sadly I'm stuck with SMB1 until I get a new NAS. :/
Maybe that helps me. I set up network storage to synology. Then made a backup to see if it ended up there. After a while HA said error. No files on Synology appeared. And I now no longer get into HA - Storage or HA - system backup screens. They remain blanc. :( All the rest of HA still works though. UPDATE: backup was made, it just took very long to upload the backup file to the synology share.
This is great but Google drive is known for randomly deleting files so I would not trust it for a true off site backup. There are many other solutions to this: aws, azure, other services that have private encrypted solutions. Sadly free is not truly free.
Hi, i keep getting the follwoing??? Im trying to add network storage to truenas. Mounting backup did not succeed. Check host logs for errors from mount or systemd unit mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-backup.mount for details.
Is anyone else getting this stupid error? Could not unmount name due to: Transaction for mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-name.mount/stop is destructive (mnt-data-supervisor-mounts-name.mount has 'start' job queued, but 'stop' is included in transaction).
Great topic! The best backup is the one you never need. Second best is the backup that you need and have. The worst (but most common) backup is the one you meant to create. The google add-on is a great tip. I had a forgotten additional Google account that I can put to good use now. Indeed better than the NAS backup (and far better than local backup only). One minor thing if you use a 'fresh' Google account. Before being able to sync with Home Assistant, you should not only be logged in, you'll need to have actively visited drive.google.com at least once, which 'activates' it.
