Please setup a way for HA to automatically take care of its own maintenance. It should update monthly on its own, it should automatically purge old log files, it should create automatic backups and should delete old backups after some time when newer successful backups exist. Obviously this requires some planning to protect systems from potential issues.
I understand there are old school techies who prefer think doing manually is better. There could still be a checkbox for “I prefer to do maintenance myself”. We can accommodate the few luddites while making it easier for most people.
As HA becomes more widely used, many people (like our parents or cousins who aren’t techie) don’t want to do these manual tasks or hire people to maintain it every month. Most people just was it to keep running and taking care of itself. Having the HA run out of space and integrations stop or missing out on new features is highly frustrating.
To summarize, HA is really an automation tool. It should be able to automate it’s self by default.
You can automate all of this. The intentions with HA is for you to set these automations up yourself. Everything you mention here is doable from a normal HA automation.
I think it’s pretty poor form to call advanced users of HA Luddites.
Especially those who actually know something about the system and fully understand what pitfalls lie in having everything done for you with a system as complex as HA - especially updates since they typically include several breaking changes literally every month.
You reference your “parents or cousins who aren’t techie” as the target of these things.
so let’s say, for example, your parents have a bad update (or any of the other things might make HA need attention like the aforementioned breaking changes to a critical integration) and HA is down now for some reason.
Do you think that the “parents or cousins who aren’t techie” will able to fix it themselves? Do you think they’ll now be more or less frustrated with HA if they wake up in the morning to start their day and HA has inexplicably died in the middle of the night and they now have zero idea where to start looking because:
1 they have no idea what happened to cause the issue since it all happened automatically for them so they don’t know what HA was doing when it died
2 they aren’t “techie” enough to know what they even need to look at to try to figure it out so now they need to hire someone to fix their HA system but they have to go to work so they don’t have the time to mess with it right now.
3 they don’t have any idea where those automatic backups are even stored so they can’t even do that either because…well…you know…they aren’t “techie” enough.
There are real reasons why us “Luddites” don’t like the idea of having HA do some of these kinds things in the background. And it’s not because we aren’t the “techie” ones.
Exactly.
And doing what you are requesting is the least reliable way for that to happen.
+1 !! automatic update is just one of the worse idea (and I stay polite), when a system works you don’t update it just for updates, it’s best way to break everything !
So if your parents or cousins aren’t techy, what are they using HA for?
As a shiny remote?
Because that is what most people use HA as. They barely scratch the surface of automations and if they aren’t great with computers then they for sure aren’t setting up complex automations with templates that require the latest version of HA. Am I right?
I would consider myself as fairly advanced user and I run a 2 month old version, and probably have not even touched any of the new things that was introduced in the last 6 months of updates.
I have a old, just fine working dashboard. I don’t use any LLM and have just barely dipped my toes in voice assistant.
But I have a ton of automations that is rather complex and make life easier for us.
So what exactly is it your parents do that require the latest version all the time?
And regarding backups, use the addon Google drive. It will do all the things you ask for.
It wasn’t my intention to be critical or demanding. My intention was to make a request for a feature and express where the idea comes from (which in this case is my frustration with an option that would also help others in my situation).
I didn’t realize it had been 2 years since my last post. I guess that’s how often I’m reminded that something like this is needed.
I have tried to figure this out in the past but haven’t been able to get it to work. So I must rely on the kindness of others who are smarter than me to make the how-to’s.
You’re right, that was poor form. I sincerely apologize if I offended you or anyone else. I posted this request while frustrated after years of being unable to figure this out and after this caused issues I was unaware of and ended up costing me.
Dispute your disagreements with my request, I still feel that property implemented, it would help many people.
Yes, shiny remote is one. Another is a bridge for Google/Alexa to otherwise unavailable integrations. Also more complex automations and better fine grain control than other smart home apps.
I am not saying an update must be based on a nightly build. It could be only for stable updates that reach a threshold of successful installations before being made available for automated deployment.
I personally love the newer versions that surface more options in the GUI as I always have problems trying to get YAML working properly.
As for backups, local is fine, but it’s more around cleanup or only keeping recent ones.
Thank you. I wish I knew how. I followed how to’s in the past but I have not been able to make it work.
I will do some more research on this for myself as I know new features (if added to a backlog at all) don’t get developed overnight.
My request is for a simplified way to get this setup and working.
I don’t think anyone who has posted here thinks it’s a good idea.
It will only cause more issues.
I don’t know about bad updates.
If you mean bugs, then yes that happens.
But it’s the breaking changes that is the killer
Local backups are a really bad idea.
You should make sure the backups are not on the same machine as HA is.
But if local is what you want then I believe you actually can also with the Google Drive addon.
I have never tried but I remember it as you set the number of versions to keep on each place (local or cloud) and you could probably set it to zero on cloud.
This is not how it was intended to be used but it does give you good options to manage your backups