2025.1: Backing Up into 2025!

[Ogun]

This is promising.

I have been irregularly using home assistant for about 2 years now, and it’s been fairly seamless, though I semi recently migrated stuff and added a lot more…then this happened.

Honestly I just use click here to backup, update stuff, and I have very little personal data exposed, so most of the concerns I thought just wouldn’t affect me, but ‘I can’t just click backup, try something, then seamlessly roll it back’ was an ugly and unexpected showstopper. Mostly my backups are just convenience!

I am glad this is being changed/addressed, and thanks to the mods and the devs who realized this is actually maybe a little more intrusive than they thought. I look forward to getting off 2024.x whenever this gets running, so I can go back to my simple structure that works for my tiny closed system (some integrations are expecting 2025 stuff, so getting some issues with newer things).

[IngeJones]

(v.2025.1.2) My local backups (to another computer on the LAN) went on working at the time I had already chosen in the automation and without encryption. Or at least they claim to be unencrypted. I am not brave enough to try a restore, or update to 2025.1.3

[Lakini]

Thanks so much for the detailed communication on the status quo and the current plans etc, really really well-written!

One question: would you prefer questions/discussions around the process behind all of this in a separate thread? Dont want want to digress in this one, but I’d be curious to understand the decision process both for the new communicated plans specifically, and in general (idea, prio, development, beta, release, feedback channels, …) and how/if this concrete experience led to overall changes to the process

[dumbdevice]

@MissyQ

We will implement turning off encryption with a per location basis.

That’s a great news!

[frenck (Franck Nijhof)]

@tom_l

One thing that I did not see mentioned, has any thought been given to generating events or creating an entity to provide feedback on the automatic backup started/success/fail status for us to generate notifications?

The feedback has been received, like a few more in this thread. We are exploring, but at this point, no decision has been made (hence it is not in the list above). It doesn’t mean we are ignoring it. However, we prioritized other things first.

We keep iterating, as we always do.

…/Frenck

[tom_l]

Makes sense. Thanks Frenk.

[KennethLavrsen]

Your priority is 100% spot on and very happy with your conclusions.

The only thing I want to add is that when you use Encryption, it will be good to be able to use your own password/key.

It is great that the UI autogenerates a safe key and I am sure most will use that. But I would personally use a very safe home made key which I have a better chance of remembering.

The other reason is that if you come back to the setup of backups later and by accident click on Change Encryption Key - and now have to deal with a 2nd generation of backups. It will be good to be able to fix that by simply typing in the old key again. Right now you can do this by hacking a file in .storage but it is better if it is the UI. So my suggestion is to let the field work like it does now including generating keys but make the field editable in JS and not read only for the user.

And it is perfectly OK to enfore a minimum length equal to the auto key. One can always pad a few extra punktuation characters on a favorite super password.

And again. This has lower priority than the already planned changes. This is input for future.

[MissyQ (Missy Quarry)]

Massive thanks all around to everyone staying on topic!! I appreciate all the acknowledgements y’all have made regarding my efforts here - those make the difference in my day.

Since a couple asked, this is something I’d like to clarify: more questions about the process behind all this, and further suggestions for this feature.

If you have a suggestion that has not been noted as feedback in this thread, please open a Feature Request thread - let’s utilize our regular paths for those.

If you have feedback mentioned in this thread but not yet addressed, let’s wait to see what the Beta update will bring to continue those discussions. This means I would absolutely love it if you bring it up again in the new thread made for 2025.2 Beta so that I can work on getting you a clear answer.

If you have a bug/issue directly related to backups, let’s also get that posted up in the Beta thread once it’s created. What I need from those of you who have these before you post is for you to join Beta this month (if you aren’t a regular beta tester) and test how it works for you after these updates so you can give the team the most up to date information on the situation. It’s very likely things will be redirected to post an issue on GitHub, but I will give space in the Beta thread to discuss things before they are posted on GitHub.

If you want to know more about the processes/discussions that lead to decisions, this question gives me some thoughts on how to move forward with that - but I want to say that the full answers will likely take a bit to get as we tweak the feature further. I can’t make any promises but I will state that I’ll start discussions on how we can share answers for those - however the public discussion may be best as its own thread instead of any of the new ones moving forward. That’s probably a more vague answer than expected, but that’s mostly because I hadn’t considered this yet and now I am.

Happy to clarify anything else on this front. <3

[dschinghis]

Is there already somehwere a HA fork with normal backup thats I could use in the meantime? (as 25.1.3 did not improve situation)

[sparkydave (🇦🇺 Dave)]

Just downgrade to 2024.12.x

[orange-assistant (wisecracker)]

@dschinghis

HA fork

32.1k - Plesse tell us which satisfied you the most

[smartin]

I am really reliefed to read this. Really.
Thanks everyone involved for the willing to rethink, step back, invest time and Energy! Highly appreciate it.

While its totally understandable that no ETA is given for when the changes are done, i hope it is not with low priority and we dont have to wait too long. But, probably one learning from the last Weeks is ‘better one loop more than two loops back’

I second that wish

@MissyQ

to know more about the processes/discussions that lead to decisions

Maybe, if you guys wanna take your time on reflecting and discussing (i would defenitly need that), it might be an idea to just describe the actual Status Quo? That could be the starting point for

@MissyQ

the public discussion may be best as its own thread

However, in the First place i just wanted to express my Relief, and thank everyone who was part of that Process!

[FilipeOS]

My input timer stopped working on this monthly updates… when I change select the timer is not update…

any advise? worked for months…

input_select:
  bedroom_ac_select:
    name: Bedroom AC Timer
    options:
      - "Off"
      - "00:20"
      - "00:40"
      - "01:00"
      - "01:30"
    initial: "Off"

  kids_room_ac_select:
    name: Kid´s Room AC Timer
    options:
      - "Off"
      - "00:20"
      - "00:40"
      - "01:00"
      - "01:30"
    initial: "Off"

  living_room_ac_select:
    name: Living Room AC Timer
    options:
      - "Off"
      - "00:20"
      - "00:40"
      - "01:00"
      - "01:30"
    initial: "Off"

  office_ac_select:
    name: Office AC Timer
    options:
      - "Off"
      - "00:20"
      - "00:40"
      - "01:00"
      - "01:30"
    initial: "Off"

timer:
  bedroom_ac_timer:
    name: Bedroom AC Timer
    duration: '00:00:00'
  kids_room_ac_timer:
    name: Kid´s Room AC Timer
    duration: '00:00:00'
  living_room_ac_timer:
    name: Living Room AC Timer
    duration: '00:00:00'
  office_ac_timer:
    name: Office AC Timer
    duration: '00:00:00'  

I can’t understand what changed

[astefanovski (andrej)]

Awesome! Looking forward to these changes

Absolutely the right call to automatically/force encrypt when it’s headed for a cloud service, great to see such a rational outcome.

[umrath (Thoralf Will)]

All units are gone in Homeassistant.
My Dahsboards only show the raw numbers. No “°C”, no “kW”, no “%”, etc. anymore.
Also, when I look into the entities themselves, they all are bare numbers, without any unit displayed.
(2025.1.4)

I already restarted Homeassistant. But that didn’t change anything.

[TheFes]

@umrath Probably browser cache

[umrath (Thoralf Will)]

No, no caching issue.

It actually solved itself after quite some time. Not sure how and why but it took about an hour or so until the units reappeared.
Statistics are still broken, though.

[sherman.hall]

I am guilty of not reviewing all 1258+ posts mostly related to backups. This may have already been mentioned, but I find that if I initiate a manual backup through a scheduled automation, it is stored unencrypted … at least according to the entry summary in the backup catalog. I store these backups on my NAS and do want them to be unencrypted.

When I schedule an automated backup using the backup feature, it stores the data in an encrypted state, including in the cloud (Nabu) … which seems to be the correct approach.

If I am reading things properly, using the automation to initiate a backup seems to be a reasonable work-around.

alias: 0300 Daily Backup
description: ""
triggers:
  - trigger: time
    at: "03:00:00"
conditions: []
actions:
  - action: hassio.backup_full
    metadata: {}
    data:
      compressed: true
      homeassistant_exclude_database: false
      location: <<Your SMB Location Here>>
mode: single

[IngeJones]

Yes that’s what I’m doing.

[pove]

Team mentioned that they do database clean stuff at those night hours. That’s why they do automatic backup at 4:45h.

I don’t know exactly what they do nor at what specific time. Some detailed info about this would be great.