For those that use the samba backup add-on, there’s a thread discussing these changes as related to that add-on here:
The existing VS Code add-on supports version control already. No reason to reinvent the wheel.
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Off-site backups seem overkill for Home Assistant if you’re already storing the backups off-device.
I’ve got backups on device. I’ve got backups on my NAS. Something that kills both of those sets of backups will have probably destroyed most of the home or at least the electronic devices within. An offsite backup wouldn’t be useful because I’d be replacing so much stuff that it wouldn’t be helpful to do anything but restart from scratch.
Offsite backups are for things that are still relevant if the site is destroyed. Documents, records, family photos and so on. Not a home automation system that’s been tailored to a structure that’s going to need significant repairs if not a rebuild.
In any case, like many others, my primary use case for backups is rolling back if an update is broken (my fault for missing a breaking change or just a broken update to an add on or core), or digging into the file structure to recover an automation or dashboard view I want to revert to get the yaml for a copy-paste job. The encryption breaks that, and lengthens the process for restoring in the case where an update went bad.
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Oh I’ve no intention if it already exists. I had no idea :). Thanks for the tip. I think I’ll be installing this pronto
I’m already feeling sad for all the users that will open a topic here, in full panic mode because they lost the keys to decrypt their backup. Either because they didn’t know they needed to save it, they deleted it by accident, they no longer remember where they stored it 5 years ago or the key was on the same system that had a failed HA running on it.
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Does it work when doing changes from the UI? I do have the VS Code Add-on, but I do most of the configuration from the UI.
Hey guys!
I must say I welcome the new backup feature. It brings some functionalities that were missing previously. But it is not without it’s shortcomings.
Plus 
Backup retention
The old backup feature only allowed you to create new backups. If you wanted to automatically purge backups that you no longer needed you had to figure that out yourself. I welcome the retention feature of the new backup feature which allows me to set a number of backups to retain or number of days.
Cloud backup
This was an unexpected bonus. I usually create backups locally and than copy them to my NAS using the samba add-on. Now I could have synced that to a cloud service to adhere to the 3-2-1 best practice, but I never did. As I have the Nabu casa subscription this instantly took care of my offsite backup.
Needs improvement 
More granular backup schedule
With the old backup feature I periodically removed the backups I no longer needed. But now that we have a retention setting I maybe even want to create hourly backups to decrease my RPO (amount of data loss). The retention setting makes sure these backups don’t fill up my disk. But unfortunately the current schedule settings doesn’t allow me to set hourly automatic backups. Also I find it really annoying that the backup time is now set to 4:45 with no way to change it.
I already had a backup that failed and I suspect that this is due to everyone uploading their offsite backup to Nabu casa which caused an unintentional distributed denial of service.
Configurable database purge
I read somewhere in this thread the 4:45 time was chosen because a scheduled database purge occurs at 04:00. It would be nice if this was configurable so you can align this with your backup schedule. Or maybe even have the purge triggered by a backup.
Encryption toggle
It would be nice if you have the ability to toggle encryption for those of us that don’t use a cloud service to store an offsite copy of home assistant.
Decryption tool
Given the open nature of the home assistant ecosystem a documented way of decrypting the backup yourself is a must in IMHO.
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hm…
Those two are possible for a long time, using samba backup addon. But even without this addon saving to a attached network drive was possible before.
BTW… just 5 minutes ago it happened again: i needed a couple lines of my code from esphome’s yaml (yeah, i fu**ed up…wasn’t the first, won’t be the last…). I simply opened my backup (created old way) and copied old version back. This is not possible with new backups, as dev’s think it’s not needed, obviously…
Or just simply make the MANUAL BACKUP
- Encryption Free…
- Which would work for Me
(a slogan to remember)
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MANUAL BACKUP is still there but now it involves more mouse clicks vs old version. And of cause newly created manual backups are now encrypted
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Yes, as it just monitors changes to the files.
How? I mean, you have to initialize a repository?
After modify an automation through the UI, you need to go to the add-on and commit changes?
You have to connect to a GitHub account or install git server?
For your information, I now only use the automatic backups for the Nabu Casa cloud!
Since my VM just run full after 3 backups and no Option to Change time because my NAS ist off at night to save energy.
Maybe the time can be changed soon… then I’ll can use it for the NAS too.
But I also have 2 daily and 1 weekly backup at 3 different locations via Proxmox.
But my test HA (RPi4) hast effectly no automatic Backups:
- no Nabu Casa Cloud account for it
- Backup on SD (is no Backup, i cant reach it when the SD fails)
- NAS is offline at night
And to make it even worse:
- no Backup when I update something
if you create it over the action its not encrypted (yet)
action: hassio.backup_full
You should look up Git and VS Code in the forum. It’s not hard to setup. Best to start a new topic and not keep it in the backup thread.
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Ok, thanks. But the main reason many people is complaining about encrypted backups is because they are using them as a version control of their configuration. So I think the problem here is not the encrypted backups but the lack of an easy version control system.
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In the previous backup solution, you could change the default storage location. I can no longer find this option in 2025.1.
As soon as an SMB share is entered in the basic HA configuration, it causes various problems with the user-friendly Samba backup. This could be avoided with the 2024.x version by changing the default storage location in the older (and better) native backup solution to local.
Does anyone know a solution for this? Otherwise, I would try to completely delete the SMB share in the HA configuration. It wouldn’t be a big deal, since the backups created by HA are encrypted and therefore almost useless.
Fixed: I completely deleted the SMB share in the HA configuration (it was only used for the useless native backup anyway) and Samba Backup is running perfectly again. I’ll stick with it until the end of Samba Backup (which hopefully never happens)…
Fortunately, I now have unencrypted backups on the NAS again, which even have a descriptive name 
I think you’re running into some other issue. I have both samba share addon running and the new automated backups running.
Interesting. Are the automatic native backups and the Samba backups stored in the same share? What name do you give the Samba backups in the same share?
