I have had my backups working forever using a samba share from a Synology NAS. After the upgrade, and running through the wizard and selecting the existing backup Storage entry, both automatic and manual backups fail. It is creating a 4kb tar file on my NAS, so I know it’s not samba connectivity or security. I’m also nowhere close to being out of storage - local is has 25gb free and the NAS 12tb. I have tried multiple combinations of including local and remote storage, including and not including add-ons, etc. There are no errors noted in home-assistant.log.
Did you select history as well in your settings?
Tried both with and without.
The tar file that is created on the NAS has only 1 file in it, @PaxHeader, with contents
28 mtime=1736028227.1569822
I read somewhere that backups in HA might soon need to be encrypted.
I have no idea if it has been activated yet or if samba backup is affected.
Did you read the release notes?
I migrated to 2025.1.0. Backup to local drive and Nabu Casa works fine.
@jchh: including history
@WallyR: yes Backups are now encrypted, see Release Notes
You’ll know because it gives you the encryption key to save first. …but it is in 2025.1.0
…not sure why you are telling me this.
The OP have upgraded to that version.
I was replying to (asking) the OP to help them fault find.
…no worries 
Yes, I know. …but you wrote:
I read somewhere that backups in HA might soon need to be encrypted.
So I was replying to provide you with the ‘when’ 
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If you used built-in backup then yes, they are encrypted now. Your option is to installand use “samba backup” - for now it still works unencrypted.
As @Protoncek said. Use Samba backup. I feel Home Assistant (proper?) is trying too hard to protect people against themselves, or promoting their “cloud” service over others.
I would recommend Samba Backup IF your local network is secure.
MrGrey.
Although there is some point in this making HA backups encrypted is handling things in totally wrong way - a man should make sure it’s network is secure alltogether. If so, there’s nothing to worry about if backups are stored locally. But for sure encrypting HA’s backups is not the proper way to defend against possible attackers into my local network.
If someone breaks into my network i’ll have quite some other more important things to worry about, and HA backup is here pretty low in hierarchy.
After all, as one guy here said: what will hackers to if they break into my HA? Turn my lights on? Set my climate to 15 degrees? I’ll survive both… 
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We’re going off topic. The OP activated the new functionality, but originally had the default storage location set to Samba. What confuses me is that the new functionality has checkboxes for local, network and cloud, while keeping the default storage location. So my guess is that HA is considering local to be the default storage location. If so, it is creating the backup on the Samba drive thinking it is local, and then trying to copy it to the Samba location, which is essentially the same place. Try to set the default storage location (top right menu) to local again to see if that works.
I can’t say for sure, but I think the Samba addon is creating the backup locally and then copying it to the samba drive, because when I have failed backups, b cause I ran out of storage space there was only a partial backup file on the th local drive.
I had a similar issue with a different update many months ago. A combination of restarts and updates fixed it eventually. With that said the backups were being created properly in my case but I could only access them by connecting to HA via ftp or smb. If you are having a similar bug they may still be on your HA instance if you look.
Ah, yes. I was mistaking the network storage from HA with the Samba addon, which was created before the network storage existed… Samba addon does indeed do a local backup first. Which might also be bad if your local storage is starting to fail.
I have problems wit Synology backups too.
I am on the 2025.1 of HA bud only activated the backups to NAS with this version so I can’t compare to the previous versions.
So hwre is my situation:
Backup to local storage - working
Backup to NAS without history data (settings only) - working
Backup to NAS with history fdata - stays pending…
By “pending” I mean that the backup is physically finished on NAS but the HA still displays the message “Creating backup” with the blue circle rotating…
The only difference between Backup to NAS with and without history data is the backup file size (58MB vs 6.4GB). Yes I have a very large history with purge_days set to 365 but it should still work.
Any ideas?
OP here.
This thread was more to be a bug report than anything. I was using OOTB functionality before - samba share configured in Storage, tagged as Backup. After upgrade, local backups are completing; samba backup is failing, however it is creating a stub file of sorts in the samba share, therefore connectivity isn’t the issue. Encryption isn’t the issue either, as that is done inside the backup and wouldn’t matter whether it was local or not.
Core issue: creating a backup in a previously officially supported manner is now failing after upgrading to 25.1.0.