Can I suggest stickying or modifying the top post to add information?
People aren’t going to read 820 posts of airing of grievances. That’s just not going to happen in this world.
ETA: The top post estimates the following:
There are 822 replies with an estimated read time of 134 minutes.
I read every single post in this thread including yours and will continue to do so. Sorry no it’s not too much to ask to at least skim it.
The mods are watching this thread extremely carefully as well as the NC staff - it’s worth a few minutes to read why. Copy pasta it into an llm and ask it to summarize it. But no - don’t ask the mods to do more work.
There’s really no need, people will air their grievances anyways. If we mark a solution, people will be upset with whatever is marked. This is a no-win situation for moderating, so moderators are not going to make any special arrangements.
Fair enough. I’m not saying people won’t. I’m just suggesting summarizing the information NC wants to get out and put it in a prominent location.
But can I still suggest summarizing the information it in the first post? Or stickying Baloob’s response? Just a suggestion and I don’t think this is making special arrangements or marking anything as a solution.
Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a long time, it will not be read. It will not make the situation better.
I think expecting people who haven’t been following this thread to read 800 comments or even skim through them before writing anything is just unrealistic. It’s the nature of forums, people will keep writing about things that were already discussed.
For this reason I hope the team will make a separate blog post once there is more information about the future of the backups and what decisions were made after hearing the feedback from the community (and not just post it here). Hopefully the result will satisfy everyone and there won’t be another 800 posts megathread with that 
That was a lot of reading. 800+ posts…
My 2 cents (and nothing new):
I will hold off updating until dust has settled and the core team has taken the actions they promised. I trust they listened carefully
I’ve been trying to work out why NC would take the approach it did - rushing a major change to something as sensitive as backups, while also not taking on board the feedback and early warning bells raised by community members it trusts during the design/beta phase - so I can give it the benefit of the doubt, since my personal belief is it wants to do the right thing by its users and contributors.
Even though this has yet to be stated/confirmed, the strongest-sounding reason to me from this thread so far is the cause has something to do with GDPR, since compliance can be scary and the possible penalties have a way of creating urgency and project scopes based on “what’s the minimum we have to do to calm the lawyers”.
I work a lot on technical delivery for regulatory compliance projects, and I know there are many ways to interpret various regulations. In fact regulatory wording is often couched vaguely on purpose to allow creativity, flexibility and future-proofing when it comes to technology.
So here was my thought: if NC’s concern is that GDPR requires it to protect personal information contained in backups when stored by NC in its cloud, then rather than encrypting the backup, would another option be to instead encrypt the virtual ‘user drive’ that each NC subscriber has on its servers? So every file is encrypted at rest with a personal key that the subscriber’s HA installation holds, and so to the authorised user all files are readable in the clear, but anyone else accessing the NC storage of that user just gets the encrypted versions? (I would have thought that NC would already be doing this, but if not then maybe implementing this would fix the backup problems, since no backups would need to be encrypted? And if it is doing it already then I don’t understand why further encryption of just the backup files would be needed by GDPR?)
Anyway, that was just an idea, and I’m not overly familiar with what services NC subscribers receive so maybe this won’t work, but maybe there’s some nugget in there that can be iterated on by folk more technical than me.
My other thought was maybe it can be handled in the UX? For example, in the backup options ask the user if they want their backups stored locally somewhere on their local HA or LAN or FTP and if they say yes then for each destination chosen ask do they want any encryption. Next ask them if they want their backups stored in any cloud repositories (multiple selections can be made), offer a list of supported ones, and for each cloud option they get asked if they want encryption. And you guessed it: if they choose the NC option then the encryption answer is preset to ‘yes’ and can’t be changed. Nice and simples? 
you could also just host a local git / version-control tool…
I don’t think, it needs to be github / any other public one … or?
Many pages in HA stopped working, but also the backup page; when I go to settings/system/backups, I get: Error while loading page backup. I have the same with trying to edit the energy dashboard or going to the “automations & scenes” dashboard, or going to “Areas, labels & zones” also doesn’t work.
What would I be able to do to get it fixed (since I can’t access the backups page, I can’t restore a backup)
Have you tried clearing your Browser cache? Or try in an incognito/inprivate tab?
It is also possible to restore backups through the CLI if you have SSH or access to the HA terminal.
On PC or in mobile app?
I’ve been observing the same issue in iOS mobile app occasionally since release in October/November (it might be one of the recent iOS apps instead of HA core). Then I need to reload page with pull down gesture.
Thanks, it seems that in the mobile app (android) I am able to restore the backup, all pages are working on my laptop now again as well (after the restore I initiated on my mobile app)
Hi Kenneth, silly to speak english to each other, but we’d better in this forum 
And great that you watch my attempts on making useful content
It’s great that Paulus explained in a video, but that is not legally binding, and is absolutely not enough for GDPR, I know a lot of Americans (and even Europeans), and people in US doesn’t understand the implications on this, but it MUST be in a document, it MUST be publicly available and it MUST be unambigous, a pinky-promise simply doesn’t cut it.
Then the NIS-2 arrives shortly (postponed until this summer) making it even worse.
I work in a company where we have americans employed, we’ve gone through the rather laboreous task of making them GDPR compliant as we have clients with data that requires gdpr compliance, it’s just something you HAVE to take into consideration when working in Europe…
The Home Assistant software itself can not be targeted, as that is open source, and as there is no direct customer relation, it’s the job of the user to comply, but as soon as you involve a company, storing customers (subscribers) data on their system, it’s a whole other ballgame.
I love that they want to help HA users this way, I think it’s fantastic, plain and simple, they should just be carefull and not open themselves in to problems.
Yes. Maybe there is some written description somewhere about location of servers. Could be on the Nabu Casa site. Did not look. And I personally do not care to prioritize that aspect.
I tried, for a good hour, to catch up on this thread and gave up. I have the new feature enabled and I like that I now have off-site backups (and I have a good password manager to store the key).
Now, what I’m confused at is the idea that I’m forced into using encryption on my local backups. I also have the Auto Backup HACS integration and the Automatic Backups blueprint installed. I just checked last night’s backup from that integration (easy to spot because it happens at a different time in the small hours). It’s not encrypted. I can gunzip and tar xvf no problem.
So, I have one daily backup that is encrypted, and that one goes to the cloud as well, and one daily backup that isn’t encrypted and just goes to a couple of different disks in the house.
Sounds… fine? What is all the hubbub about?
Not really having a go, just intrigued…
The change that broke many 3rd party integrations was reverted.
But the backup toggle wasn’t.
I’ll assume your right and it’s just bad timing.
Read the posts and you will know.
Geezum. OK. I’ll start from the top instead of the bottom, maybe.
(Edit another 200 posts later)
OK, I really do give up now. For others struggling, I thought the author of Auto Backup did a good job of summarising the pros and cons of the new vs old systems.
I’ll just run both systems in parallel for now. Disk is cheap and I didn’t have a backup stored in the cloud before (just never got around to it), so I’m still ahead.
This is a misconception. GDPR does not apply only to companies. It’s applied even to individual people (with the exception I mentioned earlier in the thread), and certainly could apply to Open Home Foundation. The distinction is not whether something is a company, but whether it gathers and processes personal data of people from the EU.
I don’t understand why everyone is so convinced this backup encryption topic is related in any way to GDPR. That explanation does not make much sense at all. Nobody from NC has even suggested that anywhere, as far as I’ve seen.