What you (very understandably) are missing is patience 
That’s the one thing you will get for sure with HA and new installations.
Nonetheless, the possibilties are near endless, and you should stop yourself before going overboard. NodeRed is nice, but without understanding the basics in HA, you won’t get far with it. 
So take a step back and work with what you have right now, move on step by step and always (like in never ever forget) do backups before moving on. On a side note, as you are using something to do your backups, that’s not updated yet, I’d highly recommend the GoogleDriveBackup-addOn (HA thread : Github)
Next recommended thing is the SambaAddOn. Install it, it makes your life easier, as you can get to your files directly.
That brings us to HACS. If you have attempted to install it a few times, what were the error messages there? You can find the installer file here, so you can see, what is going on before you get that error message. In short something with the paths isn’t right. So check the paths from the beginning of the installer script, here. Are these directories there and reachable?