Well - after reading about this backup saga, I’ve made my mind up.
No update from 2024.12 until unencrypted backups and restores are working absolutely flawlessly.
I am forever thankful to the devs for creating this marvellous piece of software - but you started this change to the backup and restore feature at the wrong end.
Good approach, make unencrypted backup possible for local storage and force the user to enter his own password for cloud upload. This way the user is completely aware that he has to store the password. Having an automatic password can be overseen and forgotten so easily.
I consider myself and old school user in that I use yaml more often than not and although I have embraced the UI and will commonly use it, I prefer yaml due to the ability to edit, cut & paste, search, find and replace etc.
As such, depending on how much tweaking, playing or experimenting I do, I will commonly use backups to extract previous yaml for comparison or more commonly to revert back automations, scripts, template sensors etc that I may have messed up or simply want to revert back as the results were not as I expected etc. I am never in a million years going to restore my complete system with all the associated risks entailed simply for this.
So I can use my unencrypted backups as I please and do very commonly.
I do by the way keep my password tar backup files on a cloud and to be honest if my complete cloud storage was compromised then I have way bigger problems than a few api keys being accessed.
How often have I used a backup to do a full or partial restore - Never. So if backups stay forced encrypted then I will simply no longer do backups and will use samba to extract instead.
Pretty please enable user choice as that should always be the foundation of HA…Choice
I haven’t tried making a manual backup because it forces me to add the new system. This post summarised the issue but seems to show an option for backup of add-ons though. 2025.1: Backing Up into 2025! - #99 by madbrain
fwiw, you don’t have to use the automatic backups at all, and just do what you did before.
No reason to hold back on updating to 2025.1
Old backups aren’t usable anymore!!
Although I really like that you guys updated the backup tools, it did create a problem for me!
My HA instance on VM broke the other day (long story, other time) and I wanted to migrate to my newly purchased HA Green. My backup was a working one from 2024.12.2, but Green automatically updated to 2025.1.0 when I connected it to my network. Great, under normal circumstances. But now my backups from two days ago wasn’t working anymore!!!
Had to manually downgrade using ha core update --version 2024.12.2 in the terminal after installing the SSH addon.
In the end it worked and I could restore my backup, but it took waayyyy to much time to figure this out 
Same for me. Already restarted manually my system without success. Going to settings → system → back-ups shows only the back-ups I already have on my drive. Anybody know where or how to trigger the GUI?
Same here …
well dont take my word for it, but I would think yes. It’s also what they told us during beta in Discord:
Did you try?
Love to read that the update is making people talk about it. Personally I like the start of the new Backup solution.
What I seem to be missing on my side is an announced new integration. I currently use a yaml configured setup, and would love to switch it up for an UI based integration.
After updating and trying to look for the integration it is not visible. When linking directly from the integration documentation page, I get an error.
Do other people experience the same, or is the integration available for others?
You need to decrypt name first 
Nope - didn’t try - and I won’t!
Because if it doesn’t work I am in for at least an afternoon to get everything back to where it is now.
I am going to stick with 2024.12 until the end of days if necessary.
Unfortunate, but it is free software, so you don’t really have a right to complain.
I guess it is understandable - the devs want to get more people to sign up for their cloud.
In the cloud the encrytion makes sense - so I guess this software goes where everything else goes: pay-as-you-go or go away!
I upgraded yesterday evening and initiated the new backup functionality. Its however still running. Cannot find anything in the logs apart from a reference that the scheduled overnight backup cannot take place since another process is running.
Anyone with similar issues? It seems the file has been created but there is no upload taking place.
Logger: homeassistant.components.backup
Source: components/backup/config.py:328
integration: Backup (documentation, issues)
First occurred: 4:45:00 AM (1 occurrences)
Last logged: 4:45:00 AM
Error creating backup: Backup manager busy: create_backup
That’s nonsense, the system remains completely open. Including the option to add different cloud providers and/or local backup /self hosted options. There are tons of custom components which continue to work today.
Not yet it doesn’t, but it is planned apparently.
that is just being silly. there is no report this service is either deprecated, or broken, so it still works, as it has always worked.
If that click is what you did to create backups before, there is really nothing blocking you to still do so in 2025.1
Are you saying 2025.1 cannot be restored back to 2024.12 using an old backup?
Very happy with the zooming on historical data.
Not a fan of small micro-animation for the history graphs. They ARE static.
edit: maybe it’s possible to update the graph with new sensor values while looking at the graph? The little popup window shows the numerical value of the new sensor data, but doesn’t add it to the graph.
edit2: Seems to work when not zoomed in. (which I am not sure it did in 2024)
