Hi there,
just driven by intuition, I tried to download one of the backups of Home Assistant from my Google Drive. It’s a .tar file that contains several .tar.gz files. I tried to open some of them, but none of them could be opened. I used 7 Zip on windows. The message I got was (translated): “The file can not be opened as a gzip archive”.
Is there another tool that works? Or is the backup corrupt? I have to make sure that it works, because I run paperless on home assistant and it works great. But my documents MUST be restorable if all goes wrong.
Any ideas?
Are your backups encrypted ?
If you try and extract encrypted backups, this is what i’ve seen happen in some cases.
Yes, you are absolutely right! I just disabled encryption for the Google Drive backup. Feels more “secure” that way to me. Thank you!
You should turn it back on. That is most secure and does not impede you in any way.
If your system is running and you download the backup from the Backup GUI in Home Assistant it will be automatically decrypted for you. e.g. This is handy if you just need to extract one file rather than doing a full restore.
If you do suffer a catastrophic loss that requires the “off site” backup from Google Drive then when restoring it to a fresh install all you need is your emergency recovery kit to decrypt it.
You did save that somewhere safe didn’t you?
To be honest, misusing the HA google drive backup is a simple hack to backup my documents to the cloud. I also use the HA cloud service for (encrypted) backups.
Yes, I have stored the emergency recovery kit. Thanks for pointing that out for other readers.