2025.1: Backing Up into 2025!

All I see from Frenck in beta is that it will not be changing in the beta or 2025.1 (presumably due to other moving parts/features incoming). Other comments made it seem clear they are looking at allowing encrypted/decrypted backup, but setting the expectation it will not be happening in the last beta.

Remote access and notification options is off topic here. Start another topic.

Adding my voice to the chorus of others to make encryption optional. My backups are local and private.

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secrets.yaml was created so that users could share configuration files without sharing passwords.

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That may be so but if the secrets.yaml file itself was encrypted then there would be little need to encrypt the whole backup.
Seems to me that when they allowed you to pull the passwords out of the configuration they could have gone one step further and allowed you to protect those passwords.

We’ve been over this a hundred times.WTH 2025, A Secret is secret !Why are passwords in plain text in the config_entries file? - #2 by tom_l

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Sorry about that. I did say I was new to home assistant. I hadn’t seen that discussion before.

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Should you be doing your home assistant beta stuff at work anyway?

Not relevant. You don’t know, what I’m allowed to do and secondly the devices are blocked, which I’m allowed to use for everything and independently from work times.

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Sad to see you say this as your assistance on this forum is 2nd to none in my opinion.

I cannot echo @ShadowFist strongly enough as his thoughts on this are very similar to mine and many others by the looks of this thread.

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Before it took about 50 minutes to create a backup (3gb) with an automation:

  • Recorder: Disable
  • Backup: Create Backup
  • Recorder: Purge/Repack
  • Recorder: Enabled

Now it takes almost 2 hours. Is this because of encryption? I’m on a raspberry pi 4 running from SSD. Recorder stopped running, had to enable the recorder manually.

What I find somewhat surprising is that, despite many responses in this thread explicitly asking not to remove the “update before updating” option—and the team stating they value feedback and want to understand the community’s needs—a PR like this still gets merged

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Perfect for causing data loss. What an excellent decision.

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stating <> doing

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and the team stating they value feedback
Yes, when its not too much criticism :clown_face:

I ran into this issue last night, when I needed to restore a file from a backup, just as I was about to hit the bed and had to get HA back up.

As you’ve mentioned, this is not a case that’s covered by having your config version controlled, as this is part of HA (HACS’s) internal storage files. Restoring from a backup is the only option.

Let’s talk about backups. Let’s be honest: they’re one of the most important yet often overlooked tasks. But when disaster strikes, like a hardware failure, having a reliable backup can save the day. Wouldn’t you love to be back up and running after disaster strikes?

I cannot help to emphasise the massive irony here, reading about the backup fiasco. Here is a real-life incident where less technically inclined users that have upgraded to 2025.1 with (possibly) their only backup being an encrypted one, could’ve been stuck.

I hope this is a lesson learnt.

And before this issue gets conflated by someone: This has nothing to do with the fact that it’s related to HACS. This could’ve happened to anything directly managed by HA.

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I’m one of the people saying this and seeing this PR being merged feels like a punch in the guts. There has been no response on this specific subject and then this PR. Anyone saying that the community is being heard is obviously not telling the truth. Removing this option is stupid and a huge potential cause for data loss.

Where I live we have a saying that translates to “speaking with your wallet”. I currently have a NC subscription for the sole purpose of supporting the Home Assistant project, I don’t use any of the benefits that comes with the subscription. I’m seriously considering to cancel my NC subscription, maybe that is feedback they do understand.

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WTH? Odd move.

I didn’t renew my Nabu Casa subscription in 2024 and was thinking about doing so at the beginning of 2025. I don’t really need it because I use Alexa and remote access in other ways. I was thinking about just continuing to support the project with my subscription.

Thank you for pointing out the PR. Maybe the problem is with me and I’m not able to understand the PR and a developer will comment on what it means. Until then, I definitely won’t renew (and of course not until native backups are supported without encryption).

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Like others, I’ve seen more than one error that a backup could not be uploaded. to the cloud. I suspect this is the understandable result of creating all the backups in a single timezone at the same time and overloading the server, though I can not be certain of course.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to upload a backup to the NC cloud manually, not from HA and not from the web interface either.