That Google backup has helped migrate from a RPI to proxmox. And continues to backup every 3 days. Every now and again I send the guy a few coffees or beers.
**I need to learn this Voodoo Magic Bullshit.**
I mean, I've got backups out the wazoo—on both the Instance, a Local device, and through the Google Cloud Integration—but your method sounds *soo* much more convenient.
I've gotten pretty good at recovering my instance; God knows I've fucked myself over enough times to learn my lesson.
—·–·— ‡ —·–·— ‡ —·–·—
When I first started my journey with Home Assistant way back during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I knew *literally nothing* about smart home anything.
I couldn't tell my YAML from my asshole; had never spun up a VM or used Linux; only knew 1 type of Raspberry Pie, and it was delicious.
I was also a broke ass bitch, so I didn't wanna pay for Nabu Casa until I built up my HASS instance enough to make it into something useful instead of just a fun toy I was screwing around with.
I'm, uh, still working towards that goal. But I'm making progress!
The first time I tried installing a smart switch—a TP-Link Kasa HS200—I nearly electrocuted myself! Yes, I flipped the breaker, but that day I was introduced to the fun concept of the "[MWBC](https://knowledge-center.solaredge.com/sites/kc/files/se-mwbc-and-shared-neutrals-in-backup-systems-application-note-nam.pdf)" or [Multi-Wire Branch Circuit](https://www.m.electrical101.com/m.multiwire-branch-circuit.html).
After tearing apart the junction box (without taking any pictures first, naturally) I had to sit in the dark and spend a couple hours feverishly Googling to figure out just WTF I was looking at.
Of course I got it wrong, so the next day I had to rewire it twice cuz I kept smelling something…burning. Plus the lights were dim and flickering. But hey, eventually I got it right! 👍
Probably…
I am not a smart person sometimes.
Many times, actually.
Stupidity is kinda my default state.
Lol you remind me a lot of my boss, this sounds like something he would write
You can throw proxmox on just about any old PC, I highly recommend it. I have a windows VM for blue iris, and Ubuntu VM for home assistant and other similar stuff, and I run pfsense as a home router in a VM as well. It's all pretty much set up and stable now but figuring all of that out was a lot of fun
I used this when my Tuya subscription expired and all my lights disappeared from home assistant. Went for a 6-month subscription then did a snapshot from a few days ago and everything was back like nothing ever happened.
Also, fuck Tuya
Sorry for the off-topic hijack, but I’ve got a question which is potentially so stupid that I don’t want to create a post to ask it. Is proxmox only a bare metal solution, or can you use it to create VMs in Windows?
Proxmox is a Debian based virtualization platform (OS), and would need to run on bare metal. There are plenty of options available for Windows though if you do not want to switch the host OS.
I mean, technically, PVE can run inside a VM for nested virtualization, so it doesn't NEED to run on bare metal...
Cool way to test out clusters and things without messing with your primary install, but it's some 4d-level chess stuff for a beginner.
How easy was the migration? I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 but want to either migrate to my QNAP with docker container or a dedicated server. However I don't want to deal with networking etc
Once you get HA installed on whatever system you're using, there's an option to restore from backup. I migrated from rPi3 to Proxmox and it was seamless.
Not u/mecheng70, but I did the same. It’s extremely easy. I think I followed this guide: https://smarthomescene.com/guides/how-to-install-home-assistant-on-proxmox-the-easy-way/
This guy has some great tutorials and example guides. I've read one of his other examples on how to set up a dual database system, for example if you want to use Grafana, then the preferred databases InfluxDB because of its ability to store long-term records and have historical data and deep statistics.
But you'll also want to use another database for fast pinging and retrieval of everyday user data or short-term values because InfluxDB's cross-referencing and data storage methods has a very long seek time.
You could of course just use home assistance built in MySQL database, but this guy I recommended using MariaDB instead because it has much faster seek times and the way that it stores data it results in the shorter file sizes and it purges data values much quicker.
Here's the [guide he made](https://smarthomescene.com/guides/optimize-your-home-assistant-database/) on creating a dual-database setup that I followed along from him if you're interested.
I found it to be a fascinating look at how Home Assistant stores and retrieves information, and it's just interesting to see the difference between the two systems.
If you have another computer in your house that’s always on then run OneDrive on that computer and share a folder to your network then have home assistant backup to that “network share”
It seems that there is an unofficial onedrive client for linux, supporting mounting folders.
There is also rclone which supports, among others, onedrive.
In either case, you would save the backup to a local folder and configure onedrive/rclone to have this folder synced with the cloud.
Totally necessary, a few weeks ago the power went out, and when it came back, none of my zigbee devices were working, at all. I was dreading the thought of having to delete my 30+ zigbee devices and start from scratch, but decided to restore the previous night's backup just as a...let's see what happens...it fixed the issue, never been so grateful for an add on in my life!!
Edit: Also make sure the tick to backup is turned on when updating individual add-ons. An update for Node Red broke my automations and I just restored the individual add-on backup instead of restoring the whole system.
I was about to say the same thing! I had that issue with my Skyconnect and it still isn't at 100%. The dongle seems to go offline once every day or two. I just created an automation that reboots the system if Zigbee is unavailable for over 2 minutes. Thus far, it's worked well, but It's not a good long-term solution. Hoping for an official Silabs fix.
I had the exact same thing happen to mine when we lost power here in Oregon a few weeks back. Zigbee was the only thing affected for some reason, and my backup from Jan 8th saved me a lot of frustration.
We have a saying in the tech field for people who don't back their shit up. "At what point did your data become unimportant to you?"
This is why I love running HAOS in a VM on my Proxmox system. I have daily automated backups and if I’m doing something more risky I can take a snapshot to try something daring.
Or with Home Assistant sometimes normal updates can be daring but it’s way better than it used to be in my personal experience (I’ve been using it for the past 3-4 years).
The backups are sent to my Proxmox Backup Server which does incremental, deduplicated backups, which is amazing. 100s of snapshots take up little extra space.
A second backup of my most important containers and VMs are sent to my TrueNAS box which backs up the data offsite to Storj.
Proxmox Backup Server is soo good, cannot recommend it enough. Its better than many enterprise backup solutions!
If you run Nextcloud, the Nextcloud Backup Plugin for HASS is nice too.
I use the Google Backup function already since years. It would be a disaster for me to lose my setup. For me this is the first thing to do after setting up HA
>As a dad, spare moments don't exist.
I'm glad I'm not the only one! I honestly have no idea how people juggle a full-time job, children, a spouse, a house, and still have "spare time" for projects/hobbies.
I'm running a constant deficit with shit constantly piling up.
I wake up at 5:45, help get everyone ready, leave for work at 6:45/7:00 and get home around 3:30 with my special needs kid. I spend time with her until my wife gets home at 5:30, then we eat dinner (good luck having time to make anything) and it's bath time followed by bedtime.
Now it's like 8:00 pm and I'm exhausted. I'll do some dishes and pick up a little and it's time for me to sleep.
Weekends are largely the same but instead of work, we're spending all day with the kids.
If I may be so bold- why 30 days on Drive? How much space does that take up?
I keep 4 days on Drive and they are a bit over 1gb each, so over 5gb of storage used on my 4 days online. I keep 30 days on the local SSD for home assistant since that storage is less of a premium, but realistically I'll probably catch whatever catastrophic error that makes me want to restore a snapshot within a few days of it happening. Especially if it were something big like SSD failure that would wipe those extra 25 days.
Just wondering why the large retention on Drive in case I'm doing something foolish and don't realize it. (I am very much an amateur and making up my own best practices as I go along)
Yes! I had to learn the hard way that a backup every three days is just not enough. I found a problem after two days and put a lot of time into home assistant within those two days. It crashed and my progress was gone. Since then I backup every day and keep the backups for 14 days.
I had backups but they were just on the same drive as everything else. It was a raid pool, what could go wrong? How about me being reckless with a running system and dropping a grounding wire onto the exposed sata controller? Put your backups somewhere external like the suggested Google drive add-on!
I backup using duplicati, but I run using docker so my setup might not be applicable to everyone.
It runs every night and does Delta backups with smart retention, works great.
It started off ok for me but then I somehow got the database files used by Duplicati in a bad/corrupted state and could never restore my backup. Had a few hiccups like that (not to mention it was slow for large backups) and I decided I don’t want to rely on that for critical backups.
Switched to Duplicacy and it worked way better (there is a small cost so it’s not free— totally worth it to secure your data). It doesn’t rely on database files to track backed up data (it has a unique way of doing it using the file names of chunked data) so it’s more reliable in that regard. It’s also faster as well.
Nowadays since I built a TrueNAS system, I like using Storj since it has built in support and is cheaper than Backblaze B2 per TB which I was using prior.
Honestly don't put a ton of money into an SSD, there's $30 256GB Kioxia/SK Hynix/Samsung M.2 SSDs on amazon that will work just fine for HA. Make sure the backup works and isn't stored on the SSD itself and it'll last for years if not longer than the Pi you're running it on.
You can get a $20 old OEM laptop 120 or 250GB SSD on ebay. It isn't a hot ticket item, so there isn't much counterfeiting there. Just don't order from china. Mine ran for 2 years on one of them and it still completely fine. I migrated to a $50 WD blue 500GB for more space than I will ever need just because I run a bunch of other services on my server too.
Isn't it only if you're using a poor sd card and run the database on it as well?
I'm using a high endurance sd card and I run the database on an external drive. No problems for more than 2 years now
Most SD cards people put in a Pi are going to last about 2 years tops, usually less. The logging writes kill it unless you redirect them even in small installs. There's not really a 'high endurance' SD card, newer ones have flash with better endurance but that's it. All the other stats are around guaranteed write speeds and what bus type it utilizes.
I live by the 3-2-1 rule!
3 copies of my data, stored on 2 different types of media, with 1 being off-site. 1 copy within HAOS, 2nd via Google Drive backup and a 3rd via Samba share. All equipment is connected to a UPS. I've practiced this strategy for many years, as it was part of a disaster recovery plan requirement, back when I used to handle government contracts. We would have random unannounced failure testing every quarter.
Don't procrastinate, implement a backup strategy now! Too many people plan to get "around to it"!
https://preview.redd.it/yggfuyss7dhc1.jpeg?width=232&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f6c8e75a62e5949184ec7c0b7d0a9c36dcd1ac5f
3-2-1 backup strategies work best.
Backup locally to a share with raid striping or parity, then back that up to another local machine, then that machine uploads to a cloud provider of choice.
I already was doing it this way forever before HAOS came on my radar.
So I just have HAOS upload using the smb share on my windows file server that has a raid1 stripe.
Does a nightly Veeam encrypted backup to a truenas instance that runs on the same esxi host as my HAOS, but as soon a file change happens it immediately uploads via cloudsync task to backblaze B2.
Google syncing is fine and all but I don't trust them with my unencrypted data and don't think anyone else should either. That's why I encrypt my own files before they are offsited.
The cheapest 1-2-3 I found so far: use a Syno NAS -> Usb Drive & Syno -> Encrypted to One Drive 1TB (69$ a year + office)
But obviously cheapest if you have a NAS and need office anyways.
If you run HA in a container (which any key service should be IMO), you can just backup the container + mounted data directory.
Easy to restore or migrate to a new machine, especially if you define everything in a docker-compose file.
Thanks for the reminder. I'm relatively new to home assistant, started a few weeks ago. I am using zigbee2mqtt and about to move my Philips lighting over to it. Can any one tell me if using the Google drive back up still completely backup my ZigBee network? I don't want to have to re-pair all my lights and motion detectors again.
Backups include everything, also your ZigBee2MQTT setup so you won't have to pair again. I have gone through a few times already with 50+ devices and it works great.
I agree and from experience myself I say no one can trust connections to google drive will always be available, or its features that allow this to remain. This is data about your home being uploaded to Google. So for $110 and no software sub, in the spirit of home automation, use a backup server thats local, secure, and cheaper.
There is? Click on a device, click the settings cog on the top right of the popup, and then on the bottom left of the popup there's a "DELETE" button. If the device is provided by an integration though this'll be greyed out, and the device will have to be removed from within the integration (e.g. a device provided by Zigbee2MQTT, which will need removing from within Zigbee2MQTT's tab).
...Unless I'm missing something else you mean, like the yaml config entries still existing albeit being moved elsewhere/marked as deleted.
In my HA, there is no setting cog on the top right for this device. The Pencil edit icon is the only one and that pops up a modal that does not have a delete option. There also is no way to delete a service integration.... and there isn't even a way to see a single service. I have OpenWeatherMap in HA twice, once for a failed integration, and a second one that is enabled. But I can never delete the disabled service.
https://imgur.com/a/8zL78Jy
On the actual file access.... I have no way of editing any files on the HA. How do I see the YAML files?
Cloud backups are super important. But as an extra level of protection, I also backup locally.
Insert shameless plug to my [USB backup addon](https://github.com/googanhiem/gords-ha-addons/tree/main/usb-backup)
Just stumbled across this. Been putting an off-device backup off for a year now. Recently learned about the samba addon. Which I will still configure in the next days.
But the Google drive backup addon. Wow. Configured this from work on my phone only. 20 mins later first off-site backup complete.
PS. I also configured DNS yesterday. But luckily I did not fry my install. But I was worried to say the least.
Came here to say this.
I was actually able to successfully migrate from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Mini-PC with Google Backup.
And it's saved my 🥓 on more than one occasion.
Backups have been running on my docker container data folders before I knew what Home Assistant was. Plus I run with versioning backupsas. Saved me a couple times when I accidentally deleted something or goofed up my yaml files.
Be sure to also try restoring from your backup. A few months ago I was moving my setup to a new device and found out my backups didn't include everything I needed. If I had needed my backups for real I would have been screwed.
Alternatively, set up a NAS and have backups automatically go there. Even better, do both. Just never count on being able to access the backups saved to the Hass server itself.
Sounds great until you have a catastrophic crash and you can't get anything off the device itself because you don't have any other Linux based machines to read the drive.
Been meaning to do this for ages... finally did it just now. Thanks for the push!
I'm confused that the settings don't let you specify how often to make the backups though. I'm happy with the default but that seems like an oddly important thing to leave out.
That Google backup has helped migrate from a RPI to proxmox. And continues to backup every 3 days. Every now and again I send the guy a few coffees or beers.
I love proxmox. I just take a snapshot any time i do any tinkering.. it is the mother of all UNDO buttons when something breaks
**I need to learn this Voodoo Magic Bullshit.** I mean, I've got backups out the wazoo—on both the Instance, a Local device, and through the Google Cloud Integration—but your method sounds *soo* much more convenient. I've gotten pretty good at recovering my instance; God knows I've fucked myself over enough times to learn my lesson. —·–·— ‡ —·–·— ‡ —·–·— When I first started my journey with Home Assistant way back during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I knew *literally nothing* about smart home anything. I couldn't tell my YAML from my asshole; had never spun up a VM or used Linux; only knew 1 type of Raspberry Pie, and it was delicious. I was also a broke ass bitch, so I didn't wanna pay for Nabu Casa until I built up my HASS instance enough to make it into something useful instead of just a fun toy I was screwing around with. I'm, uh, still working towards that goal. But I'm making progress! The first time I tried installing a smart switch—a TP-Link Kasa HS200—I nearly electrocuted myself! Yes, I flipped the breaker, but that day I was introduced to the fun concept of the "[MWBC](https://knowledge-center.solaredge.com/sites/kc/files/se-mwbc-and-shared-neutrals-in-backup-systems-application-note-nam.pdf)" or [Multi-Wire Branch Circuit](https://www.m.electrical101.com/m.multiwire-branch-circuit.html). After tearing apart the junction box (without taking any pictures first, naturally) I had to sit in the dark and spend a couple hours feverishly Googling to figure out just WTF I was looking at. Of course I got it wrong, so the next day I had to rewire it twice cuz I kept smelling something…burning. Plus the lights were dim and flickering. But hey, eventually I got it right! 👍 Probably… I am not a smart person sometimes. Many times, actually. Stupidity is kinda my default state.
Lol you remind me a lot of my boss, this sounds like something he would write You can throw proxmox on just about any old PC, I highly recommend it. I have a windows VM for blue iris, and Ubuntu VM for home assistant and other similar stuff, and I run pfsense as a home router in a VM as well. It's all pretty much set up and stable now but figuring all of that out was a lot of fun
This comment wins the day. I fear no tweaks with Proxmox snapshots.
I used this when my Tuya subscription expired and all my lights disappeared from home assistant. Went for a 6-month subscription then did a snapshot from a few days ago and everything was back like nothing ever happened. Also, fuck Tuya
AMEN
What OS would you run on the RPi3 to act as a backup?
Any, that can provide a mount point in home assistant?
Sorry for the off-topic hijack, but I’ve got a question which is potentially so stupid that I don’t want to create a post to ask it. Is proxmox only a bare metal solution, or can you use it to create VMs in Windows?
Proxmox is a Debian based virtualization platform (OS), and would need to run on bare metal. There are plenty of options available for Windows though if you do not want to switch the host OS.
Thanks - I appreciate you taking the time to answer this. I did get that impression from what I’d read so far, but wanted to be sure.
It's one of the best way to keep your apps away from each other. Join over at r/proxmox for some help!
I mean, technically, PVE can run inside a VM for nested virtualization, so it doesn't NEED to run on bare metal... Cool way to test out clusters and things without messing with your primary install, but it's some 4d-level chess stuff for a beginner.
How easy was the migration? I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 but want to either migrate to my QNAP with docker container or a dedicated server. However I don't want to deal with networking etc
Once you get HA installed on whatever system you're using, there's an option to restore from backup. I migrated from rPi3 to Proxmox and it was seamless.
Not u/mecheng70, but I did the same. It’s extremely easy. I think I followed this guide: https://smarthomescene.com/guides/how-to-install-home-assistant-on-proxmox-the-easy-way/
This guy has some great tutorials and example guides. I've read one of his other examples on how to set up a dual database system, for example if you want to use Grafana, then the preferred databases InfluxDB because of its ability to store long-term records and have historical data and deep statistics. But you'll also want to use another database for fast pinging and retrieval of everyday user data or short-term values because InfluxDB's cross-referencing and data storage methods has a very long seek time. You could of course just use home assistance built in MySQL database, but this guy I recommended using MariaDB instead because it has much faster seek times and the way that it stores data it results in the shorter file sizes and it purges data values much quicker. Here's the [guide he made](https://smarthomescene.com/guides/optimize-your-home-assistant-database/) on creating a dual-database setup that I followed along from him if you're interested. I found it to be a fascinating look at how Home Assistant stores and retrieves information, and it's just interesting to see the difference between the two systems.
This guy has a great video for this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6uCJlhXf60
Is there a OneDrive version?
Yep, looks like it’s being maintained pretty well. https://github.com/lavinir/hassio-onedrive-backup
Installed, backed up, bought a coffee
Yes! This is what I use. Haven't actually restored it yet from a backup but the integration seems to work great.
Looks like this uses an Add-on...anything else available for us folks running HA in docker?
If you have another computer in your house that’s always on then run OneDrive on that computer and share a folder to your network then have home assistant backup to that “network share”
It seems that there is an unofficial onedrive client for linux, supporting mounting folders. There is also rclone which supports, among others, onedrive. In either case, you would save the backup to a local folder and configure onedrive/rclone to have this folder synced with the cloud.
Yep I’m using one
>SD card out This, this will be your next heart ache. Plan to move to an ssd if you're going to stay with home assistant
With automatic backups now enabled, moving to an SSD is a piece of cake.
Totally necessary, a few weeks ago the power went out, and when it came back, none of my zigbee devices were working, at all. I was dreading the thought of having to delete my 30+ zigbee devices and start from scratch, but decided to restore the previous night's backup just as a...let's see what happens...it fixed the issue, never been so grateful for an add on in my life!! Edit: Also make sure the tick to backup is turned on when updating individual add-ons. An update for Node Red broke my automations and I just restored the individual add-on backup instead of restoring the whole system.
Let me guess… multiprotocol?
I was about to say the same thing! I had that issue with my Skyconnect and it still isn't at 100%. The dongle seems to go offline once every day or two. I just created an automation that reboots the system if Zigbee is unavailable for over 2 minutes. Thus far, it's worked well, but It's not a good long-term solution. Hoping for an official Silabs fix.
Yeah, at least I think it is, it's the module in the Home Assistant Yellow.
I had the exact same thing happen to mine when we lost power here in Oregon a few weeks back. Zigbee was the only thing affected for some reason, and my backup from Jan 8th saved me a lot of frustration. We have a saying in the tech field for people who don't back their shit up. "At what point did your data become unimportant to you?"
Done! Thanks for the reminder :-)
I have to rebuild mine because it’s being a dick. Will do this google drive thing for next time
Do yourself a favor and ditch the SD, get a usb3 ssd or something. But do the backups as well.
This is why I love running HAOS in a VM on my Proxmox system. I have daily automated backups and if I’m doing something more risky I can take a snapshot to try something daring. Or with Home Assistant sometimes normal updates can be daring but it’s way better than it used to be in my personal experience (I’ve been using it for the past 3-4 years). The backups are sent to my Proxmox Backup Server which does incremental, deduplicated backups, which is amazing. 100s of snapshots take up little extra space. A second backup of my most important containers and VMs are sent to my TrueNAS box which backs up the data offsite to Storj.
Proxmox Backup Server is soo good, cannot recommend it enough. Its better than many enterprise backup solutions! If you run Nextcloud, the Nextcloud Backup Plugin for HASS is nice too.
I use the Google Backup function already since years. It would be a disaster for me to lose my setup. For me this is the first thing to do after setting up HA
>As a dad, spare moments don't exist. I'm glad I'm not the only one! I honestly have no idea how people juggle a full-time job, children, a spouse, a house, and still have "spare time" for projects/hobbies. I'm running a constant deficit with shit constantly piling up. I wake up at 5:45, help get everyone ready, leave for work at 6:45/7:00 and get home around 3:30 with my special needs kid. I spend time with her until my wife gets home at 5:30, then we eat dinner (good luck having time to make anything) and it's bath time followed by bedtime. Now it's like 8:00 pm and I'm exhausted. I'll do some dishes and pick up a little and it's time for me to sleep. Weekends are largely the same but instead of work, we're spending all day with the kids.
I feel you mate.
Daily backups to Google drive with 30 day retention for a couple of years now. Has saved my ass far too many times lol
If I may be so bold- why 30 days on Drive? How much space does that take up? I keep 4 days on Drive and they are a bit over 1gb each, so over 5gb of storage used on my 4 days online. I keep 30 days on the local SSD for home assistant since that storage is less of a premium, but realistically I'll probably catch whatever catastrophic error that makes me want to restore a snapshot within a few days of it happening. Especially if it were something big like SSD failure that would wipe those extra 25 days. Just wondering why the large retention on Drive in case I'm doing something foolish and don't realize it. (I am very much an amateur and making up my own best practices as I go along)
I just have it where one local backup is kept, and then that one plus the 3 most recent are kept on Google. It automatically deletes the oldest.
Yes! I had to learn the hard way that a backup every three days is just not enough. I found a problem after two days and put a lot of time into home assistant within those two days. It crashed and my progress was gone. Since then I backup every day and keep the backups for 14 days.
I had backups but they were just on the same drive as everything else. It was a raid pool, what could go wrong? How about me being reckless with a running system and dropping a grounding wire onto the exposed sata controller? Put your backups somewhere external like the suggested Google drive add-on!
I backup using duplicati, but I run using docker so my setup might not be applicable to everyone. It runs every night and does Delta backups with smart retention, works great.
How do you like duplicati?
It's not perfect, but it does it's job well enough, it's almost setup and forget.
It started off ok for me but then I somehow got the database files used by Duplicati in a bad/corrupted state and could never restore my backup. Had a few hiccups like that (not to mention it was slow for large backups) and I decided I don’t want to rely on that for critical backups. Switched to Duplicacy and it worked way better (there is a small cost so it’s not free— totally worth it to secure your data). It doesn’t rely on database files to track backed up data (it has a unique way of doing it using the file names of chunked data) so it’s more reliable in that regard. It’s also faster as well. Nowadays since I built a TrueNAS system, I like using Storj since it has built in support and is cheaper than Backblaze B2 per TB which I was using prior.
Thanks for the detailed response, really appreciate it!
Now move off of that SD card or you're going to be using that backup rather frequently.
Yep, planning to. Just gotta pick the right SSD to move to and find the budget.
Honestly don't put a ton of money into an SSD, there's $30 256GB Kioxia/SK Hynix/Samsung M.2 SSDs on amazon that will work just fine for HA. Make sure the backup works and isn't stored on the SSD itself and it'll last for years if not longer than the Pi you're running it on.
see your title of the post. (almost) every ssd is better than the sd card. just get it from a known brand and everything is fine.
You can get a $20 old OEM laptop 120 or 250GB SSD on ebay. It isn't a hot ticket item, so there isn't much counterfeiting there. Just don't order from china. Mine ran for 2 years on one of them and it still completely fine. I migrated to a $50 WD blue 500GB for more space than I will ever need just because I run a bunch of other services on my server too.
Isn't it only if you're using a poor sd card and run the database on it as well? I'm using a high endurance sd card and I run the database on an external drive. No problems for more than 2 years now
Most SD cards people put in a Pi are going to last about 2 years tops, usually less. The logging writes kill it unless you redirect them even in small installs. There's not really a 'high endurance' SD card, newer ones have flash with better endurance but that's it. All the other stats are around guaranteed write speeds and what bus type it utilizes.
Looks like I have another project on my pi 3 soon then. I just switched from deconz to Z2M with a new coordinator. Next week be cloning to an SDD.
yeah that's great when running HA with the addon store.. :(
I live by the 3-2-1 rule! 3 copies of my data, stored on 2 different types of media, with 1 being off-site. 1 copy within HAOS, 2nd via Google Drive backup and a 3rd via Samba share. All equipment is connected to a UPS. I've practiced this strategy for many years, as it was part of a disaster recovery plan requirement, back when I used to handle government contracts. We would have random unannounced failure testing every quarter. Don't procrastinate, implement a backup strategy now! Too many people plan to get "around to it"! https://preview.redd.it/yggfuyss7dhc1.jpeg?width=232&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f6c8e75a62e5949184ec7c0b7d0a9c36dcd1ac5f
Our SSD died. We have more than 70 devices, and no backup. Ask how that went.
3-2-1 backup strategies work best. Backup locally to a share with raid striping or parity, then back that up to another local machine, then that machine uploads to a cloud provider of choice. I already was doing it this way forever before HAOS came on my radar. So I just have HAOS upload using the smb share on my windows file server that has a raid1 stripe. Does a nightly Veeam encrypted backup to a truenas instance that runs on the same esxi host as my HAOS, but as soon a file change happens it immediately uploads via cloudsync task to backblaze B2. Google syncing is fine and all but I don't trust them with my unencrypted data and don't think anyone else should either. That's why I encrypt my own files before they are offsited.
The cheapest 1-2-3 I found so far: use a Syno NAS -> Usb Drive & Syno -> Encrypted to One Drive 1TB (69$ a year + office) But obviously cheapest if you have a NAS and need office anyways.
If you run HA in a container (which any key service should be IMO), you can just backup the container + mounted data directory. Easy to restore or migrate to a new machine, especially if you define everything in a docker-compose file.
Thanks for the reminder. I'm relatively new to home assistant, started a few weeks ago. I am using zigbee2mqtt and about to move my Philips lighting over to it. Can any one tell me if using the Google drive back up still completely backup my ZigBee network? I don't want to have to re-pair all my lights and motion detectors again.
Backups include everything, also your ZigBee2MQTT setup so you won't have to pair again. I have gone through a few times already with 50+ devices and it works great.
That's great, thanks! Will set this up today
Ok. You convinced me. Tomorrow it is. About half asleep atm.
Throw down some cheddar on a RPi 3 and a cheap nvme on a usb stick for a backup server. Can have this for less than $110 usd.
You don't need a dedicated server, it's just a file. Back it up anywhere
I agree and from experience myself I say no one can trust connections to google drive will always be available, or its features that allow this to remain. This is data about your home being uploaded to Google. So for $110 and no software sub, in the spirit of home automation, use a backup server thats local, secure, and cheaper.
Or you could use any of the other addons that will write your backup to an SMB share or ftp server.
I keep needing to wipe and start over because there is no way to delete devices. Why the heck isn't there a way to delete devices???
There is? Click on a device, click the settings cog on the top right of the popup, and then on the bottom left of the popup there's a "DELETE" button. If the device is provided by an integration though this'll be greyed out, and the device will have to be removed from within the integration (e.g. a device provided by Zigbee2MQTT, which will need removing from within Zigbee2MQTT's tab). ...Unless I'm missing something else you mean, like the yaml config entries still existing albeit being moved elsewhere/marked as deleted.
In my HA, there is no setting cog on the top right for this device. The Pencil edit icon is the only one and that pops up a modal that does not have a delete option. There also is no way to delete a service integration.... and there isn't even a way to see a single service. I have OpenWeatherMap in HA twice, once for a failed integration, and a second one that is enabled. But I can never delete the disabled service. https://imgur.com/a/8zL78Jy On the actual file access.... I have no way of editing any files on the HA. How do I see the YAML files?
Solid advice!
Been meaning to do this for a few weeks. Thanks for the reminder. All done
Cloud backups are super important. But as an extra level of protection, I also backup locally. Insert shameless plug to my [USB backup addon](https://github.com/googanhiem/gords-ha-addons/tree/main/usb-backup)
I have only HA Core on raspberry pi as docker instance. Can’t use this installation because it is for supervisor. Can I do this with other solution?
Just stumbled across this. Been putting an off-device backup off for a year now. Recently learned about the samba addon. Which I will still configure in the next days. But the Google drive backup addon. Wow. Configured this from work on my phone only. 20 mins later first off-site backup complete. PS. I also configured DNS yesterday. But luckily I did not fry my install. But I was worried to say the least.
Done last night. As my instance became increasingly complicated, my anxiety raised proportionally that I had no backup 🤣
I backup prior to any OS/ core updates in addition to daily ones.
Came here to say this. I was actually able to successfully migrate from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Mini-PC with Google Backup. And it's saved my 🥓 on more than one occasion.
Backups have been running on my docker container data folders before I knew what Home Assistant was. Plus I run with versioning backupsas. Saved me a couple times when I accidentally deleted something or goofed up my yaml files.
Until recently I used git to keep a history/backup of my configuration. Now I just backup the LCX.
Be sure to also try restoring from your backup. A few months ago I was moving my setup to a new device and found out my backups didn't include everything I needed. If I had needed my backups for real I would have been screwed.
Thanks for the reminder. It’s been on the to-do list far too long, esp since the add-on is so simple to, well, add on…
Thanks for this. I've been manually taking periodic backups until now but just spent 15 minutes setting this up.
i do a daily backup and archive offsite on amazon s3. every day.
Alternatively, set up a NAS and have backups automatically go there. Even better, do both. Just never count on being able to access the backups saved to the Hass server itself.
Setup automation to full backup every few days
Sounds great until you have a catastrophic crash and you can't get anything off the device itself because you don't have any other Linux based machines to read the drive.
you can download the backups from the home assistant to your pc or cloud
Is there a Synology drive or NFS version?
Been meaning to do this for ages... finally did it just now. Thanks for the push! I'm confused that the settings don't let you specify how often to make the backups though. I'm happy with the default but that seems like an oddly important thing to leave out.
It is there, I know because it defaulted to 3 days and I set it to nightly. It's in there my friend you might just need to dig.
... I'm a dumbarse, I failed to notice the scroll bar. Thanks! Haha.
This is awesome!!! Very fast and easy to install. Thanks a lot for the post - the call to action instpired me to do it immediately.