since I have HA running for a few months now, I thought it would be a good time to setup backups. So the new feature in 2023.6 came right on time for me.
It works quit straight forward and does its job.
There is one thing I don’t like so much and that is that I noticed that HA logs into the share that I’ve created on my NAS every 10 minutes, preventing the NAS disks from going to sleep and keep them constantly running. As I basically only use my NAS only for file storage I have no need to keep the disks spinning all the time and want to save that energy, so this is a bit of a show stopper for me.
I am wondering if this can be prevented ?
Or which other setups do people have to backup to a NAS without having this issue ?
I welcome your suggestions
I hadn’t noticed that, thanks for letting us know!
Has anyone else seen HA connecting to the NAS every 10 minutes? This would be a show-stopper for me, too. In my testing I’d connected to two shares. I know that since then, I’ve heard my NAS spinning up a couple of times, so I’m pretty sure it’s been able to go into a sleep mode.
I have mine set to 20 minutes. I thought I heard it spinning up a few times, so I assumed there was no write activity for at least 20 minutes prior to that. I suppose it could also be some other task kicking off which hit the drive a bit harder, making me think it was spinning up even though it was already running.
No matter. I haven’t really used the new network connections anyway. I just deleted them. My primary backup strategy is to pull from the HA device over SMB. I only use the HA “full” backups when I update, which is generally once a month, after the initial round of point updates slows down.
I seem to have a fundamental problem of not being able to display any of the pictures in the /media folder using the picture glance card. I have used network storage to mount an SMB share, and this shows up via the media browser under My Media/Favorites. I also have other jpgs/mp4s in the /media folder which I can also see via the Media browser, but can’t get the picture glance card to show them.
I do have images in the /config/www folder and could get the picture card to display these using the /local path. However, the network storage mount is placed in the /media folder so this isn’t helpful. I tried creating a symlink (ln -s) from /config/www to /media but the picture card can’t seem to follow that either.
What’s odd is that even when I add
homeassistant:
media_dirs:
local: /media
to my configuration.yaml, any reference to /local still points to config/www.
The documentation at Media Source - Home Assistant is not clear at all on how to actually use the content that is in the /media folder.
Any pointers would be much appreciated. I’ve spent hours on this now.
Using this, having retention times and many more things. Since this is an Addon it seems to work pretty solid.
Using it for at least 2 years and it seems to work. I recently restored from a backup and it worked.
Im also a fan of official solutions and the official approach is a very nice step into the right direction of ditching the addon tho.
I’ve been scouring the boards for over a day looking for a way to write to a Windows share from Home Assistant OS with CIFS. There’s a ton of topics about it going back a dozen years. Just found this info about the Network Storage feature that I didn’t know existed, wow!, blew my mind, this is exactly what I needed.
So here’s what I’m using:
Home Assistant Enthusiast+ Bundle ODROID-N2+ 4GB/64GB eMMC
Home Assistant 2023.7.1, Supervisor 2023.07.1, Operating System 10.3, Frontend 20230705.1
Node-RED Add-On, Current version: 14.3.0
Windows 10 PC with CIFS/SMB enabled in Windows Features via Control Panel/Programs and Features.
I created a shared folder on the Windows PC, created a share in HA with the Settings/System/Storage feature that points to the Windows share. I can now write a file to this share using a Node_RED File Write Node. You can find the share in HA using the File Editor Add-On. It will be in the /Share directory.
Thanks again HA for finally providing this feature!
First of all, I am very happy for this integration to add a network storage. The issue that I have, is that I am not able to write on the added network storage. I use HA 2023.10.3 core installation on a PI4. I added my network harddrive WD mycloud EX2 through NFS to media - checked that write is enabled.
I can access the folders and files - but fail to write to the network drive. I tried to upload a file in media, use the network drive for photoprism (this complaints about not having writing rights) and use plex with it where I can access but not delete files (as it has no write access).
I can not find anyone having the same problem with the new integration, is it just me??? If anyone can help, that would be great.
I’ve just bought an Asustor NAS and have the same problem. HA keeps logging in and waking the NAS up when it should be asleep. Not helpful.
Really don’t understand why it needs to access the store unless it’s about to do a backup or you’re trying to get one back in a restore.
Others will argue it’s better to test the share regularly so you know it’s failed. I’d like the option. I’ll be going back to a local backup for now and just have to remember to SAMBA it off regularly.
My NAS is shutting down if it’s not needed.
Home Assistant gives me a notifcation and I have to remove or remount the shares. So far, so good.
But I’m wondering how to automate the remount? I can’t find a service for that?!
I know about the command_line commands but there must be another (UI) way , otherwise this NAS-Feature seems pretty useless to me?!
I’ve got HA on VMware inside Windows 11.
Just installed Jellyfin addon on HA, and used this to access my shared folder on host Windows 11, and now I can see my movies directly from my HA!!
Great, very happy!!
Coming back to this feature after a full year, it’s a bit disappointing to see none of the issues have been addressed with the poor UI, randomly named files, and that the files remain uncompressed. Hopefully on a list somewhere.
But on the bright side, it does actually work. No issues with backups for the past year, they’re all on my NAS. Compressed too, because I gzip them in a cron script.
Edit: And having come back to it again, I checked the compression and found my 4.2GB of backups compressed to a whopping 4.0GB. The HA devs made the right choice there as it’s largely full of incompressible data. Would still like human-readable filenames though.
