That response is coming from Google when the addon attempts to upload the next backup, ie Google says there isn’t enough space for the upload to complete given the file size. The addon doesn’t attempt to validate how much space is left in Drive. It just asks Google “please start uploading this XX GB file” and handles any errors that come back.
For data security reasons the addon uploads the latest backup before deleting the oldest one. This is to ensure that if you have the addon configured to store N backups, then N backups will always be present in Drive even if the upload fails. As a consequence it needs space for N+1 uploads to handle the new backup before the oldest one is then deleted.
You can change this in the addon settings with the option “Delete oldest backup before creating a new one” if you want to run a little more lean.
Does this make a new back-up locally before uploading, or does it copy the current files to a back-up on Gdrive?
I have run into an issue where I dont have enough space to create a full back-up locally and I am trying to get a back-up on the cloud so I can install a bigger SDD.
Wonderful addon! Only got me out of trouble once so far, just after I discovered this addon. That was early days of Homeassistant for me and much tinkering was afoot! Thankfully I was made aware of this addon, @smarthomejunkie if I remember rightly?
So I have backups now going back 5 months. This could be seen as overkill but from my IT background you CAN’T have too many backups!!!
I wandering about ways to reduce the overall size of my backups though, total reported backups 15GB, generational backups 6 daily, 5 weekly, 12 monthly. Included in my backup is my Influxdb database which is growing and is currently (reported by addon) 610MB. So I was wondering if it is possible to have 2 different instances running, one more historical for configuration changes and such but without big databases and going back forever, the other more short term and overwritten more frequently?
The backup has to be on disk locally before it can get uploaded. Its cumbersome, but you thing you can do is create partial backups of one (or more) thing at a time, deleting in-between uploads. I’ve never tried that specifically but you should end up in the same state as a full backup if you resotre each partial one.
Thanks for the addon, you’ve saved my ass so many times over the years.
Just a simple FEATURE REQUEST, on the popup screen that comes up when you go to add a manual backup, where it mentions that there are variables you can use, it would be good to see what the current variables are set to so that way I can just do a copy and paste into the filename field and add a bit of text on the back. (or have a button to prepopulate the filename field?)
ie: so this appears prefilled in (or is shown on that page for a quick copy and paste)
Great addon! I was able to install it at the first time. Sadly I had to restore an older backup before the addon was installed. Now I can install it again but it doesn’t start. No log error. It just doesn’t start. Is there maybe some old config from the first installation?
This seems to be a recurring problem for people after a restore, one that affects all addons (not just this one) so it looks like its something wrong in Home Assistant. The supervisor specifically. A reboot of the machine seems to fix it. Note you have to reboot the machine, not just restart Home Assistant.
Hello,
im using a password for my backup, now i need just a couple of files. How can i extract the backup (on windows) ? im not able to extact it via 7zip, winrar or winzip since they dont ask for an password
HA uses an esoteric format for it’s encrypted backups. I made a python utility that decrypts them, but it can only be used from the command line. As far as I know, this is the only way to open an encrypted backup without restoring it.
Its in the settings ui under “Partial Backups”. You can only exclude/include the top level folders (config, ssl, share, etc) or whole add-ons, which is a Home Assistant limitation.
Please take this only as constructive feedback. I have been using your software since about the end of 2020 I think. By using I mean having it create backups. But I have never needed to restore a backup until tonight. A couple of days ago my Homeassistant server stopped working. Initially it would only partly load the web page but I could ssh in and nothing looked awry. Yet automations continued to work so it was clearly still running. Then a few hours later everything stopped working. When I investigated by putting the HA memory card in a different Pi and that Pi’s memory card in the former HA server, the former HA server worked for the other server but putting the former HA memory card in the other hardware was no joy. So I concluded the SD card died.
I was dreading rebuilding everything from scratch but you saved my butt! I formatted a new SD card, put a hassion image on it, and was back up and running fairly quickly. Your product worked great!
My only criticism to both you and the HA team are that the restore process is both poorly documented and confusing. I ultimately figured it out and got everything fully restored (I think). But when you start up a new HA installation it guides down a route that you do not need to restore a backup (not your fault) so there are a lot of steps to do before installing your product to allow a restore. And then the prompts to do a restore are scary in the sense that they suggest things will be permanently deleted.
Most of the issues are on the HA side but you may want to update your documentation to forewarn of these.
Again, trying to be constuctive. You’ve produced a great product. But like insurance, cheap premiums are only great if the claims process is also good!
Heh, no need to caveat things with pleasantries. I pretty much agree and I think its a fair criticism, granted I’m saying that as someone who doesn’t maintain Home Assistant. Restoring can be a confusing mess if you don’t know how things work under the hood.
There are of course reasonable reasons things work they way they do. Honestly I think the biggest problem with Home Assistant is that it has such a nice and polished UI in so many places, it leads people to think that polish runs through everything. Every release usually cleans up some corner of ugliness, but Home Assistant does so much. Some areas (like restore) have really rough edges. Here are some things that can go wrong:
On the on-boarding screen (thats the webpage that shows up on a fresh install) there is a little link at the bottom where you can upload a backup instead of creating a new login, but it can’t upload anything over 1GB, which is a deal breaker for pretty much any serious user. So to get the backup on device you have to partially set up an instance, use something that lets you copy files over (this addon, samba addon, ftp, etc) then destroy the whole thing with a restore. God help you if the restore fails, usually can’t just retry. You usually have to set up an instance agaibn, install the addon, yadda yadda yadda. It sucks.
When you restore, each addon is handled separately and might silently fail to install, in which case HA just installs what it can and carries on. In my personal experience this is actually a pretty common failure. The only way to know it happened is to log in to the new system really fast, enable “Advanced Mode” in your user profile and navigate to the transient supervisor logs before they get garbage collected. This leaves many restores in a broken state, and few know the appropriate thing to do is do another partial restore of just the addons that failed to install.
There is no easy way to see restore progress and no obvious indication of when its finished. This makes a restore kind of terrifying, as you just sit there and keep refreshing as you hope the computer comes back online. If its been an hour and its still not up, what do you do? If its still installing then power cycling could break it. If its stalled or errored out you would have to reflash and start over. Do you wait another hour, and possibly run into the same problem? This is tedious and irritating if you’re just trying to get your fancy wifi lights to work again. There are ways to see the logs of the install (eg some indication of progress) with a mouse and keyboard using the home assistant CLI, but that certainly isn’t obvious for most users.
I have a vauge idea of how to fix some of these problems (I attempted to fix #1 in the past), but I haven’t had the free time. I think what I can do is put recommendations for how to restore into a doc. I’ve avoided doing this in the past, because there are a lot of situations to cover and the doc would be very long. It might also be a good idea for me to have a card that pops up when you install this addon, with a title like “Do you know how to restore a backup?” that links to it just to let people know that restoring might not be as stremlined as they hope. Even experienced users can get caught up.
I tried to look up the history but I did not find a solution.
There was a post about two years ago about disk space filling up.
Where does this backup stores kind of temporary oder unfinished backup files? Looks like a folder is filling up with those files and crawling away the space.
Reinstalling the addon did not solved the problem.
Looking for different solutions - reinstalling and using a backup is working - but I don’t want to rebuild HA every 3-4 months.
