Hey everyone,
I’m in serious trouble with my Home Assistant setup, and I need some advice. My system is incredibly unstable—it keeps restarting randomly or barely responds to commands via the web interface. The logs? Useless. No meaningful hints as to what’s causing this mess. Could be software, could be hardware failure—I just don’t know.
Now, here’s the kicker: I thought I was safe because I set up backups properly from day one. But now, when I need them the most, I’m completely locked out. Turns out all backups are encrypted, which is already a headache. Thankfully, I stored my encryption key securely in my password manager, so at least that part is not an issue.
But here’s where it gets frustrating: I tried multiple tools, including web-based solutions and Python scripts, to extract my backups. One tool even lists all the files correctly. I just wanted to extract homeassistant.tar.gz, but not a single file is actually recoverable! Every attempt results in an error saying the individual files are corrupted. And no, I’m not talking about the multiple TAR archives that aren’t even compressed—I mean e. g. the actual config folder in the homeassistant.tar.gz contents.
I have searched the forum and tried every extraction method I could find. Still nothing.
So I figured, fine, I’ll restore via Home Assistant’s web interface. But since my system is constantly rebooting, I can’t even get that to work.
Luckily, I still have SSH access. But that’s also useless. Running
ha backups list
shows all my backups, which is great. But why did we move away from --name "<FileName>" ? Now I have to manually dig up the Slug number just to restore a backup? That used to work before, right? It’s an unnecessary hassle.
Even when I run ha backups restore <slugnumber> , it doesn’t work! All my backups are partial, and I have no clue why.
To summarize:
- I enabled backups from the start.
- My encryption key is correct (tested by intentionally changing a character, which triggered an error).
- My backups are stored locally, on my Synology NAS, and in Nabu Casa’s cloud.
- None of them can be restored.
This is beyond frustrating. Why is it so difficult to recover backups? What can I do at this point?
By the way, I tried to restore my Home Assistant system successfully a few months ago. At least once a year I do this as a routine to see that everything is working well. So I feel very prepared for this type of issue since then. Until now…
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you in advanced.