For some reason suddenly one of my dashboards got messed up. I don’t know how (I’m careful not to open multiple dashboard editors in separate tabs, I only have one open).
Either way, I want to restore a PORTION of my dashboard. I do regular backups so last night’s backup would be ideal.
Is it possible to only look at the backup and copy/paste a small portion of my dashboard I care to restore or I need to restore the entire thing? Thanks.
I just tried looking into the archive and it doesn’t seem like i can untar it myself, giving some errors. It’s so insane I need to restore the entire installation, probably will take hours, just to view an older version of a dashboard :(. I hope someone can tell me there’s a better way 
Have you tried clearing the browser cache (ctrl+f5) to confirm it’s not a cache issue first?
Thank you, yes it’s the first thing I tried. The dashboard is very much mangled for no apparent reason I can detect but I’ve given up trying to bang my ahead against THAT issue.
I’m taking it as-is and trying to solve it by looking at an old version. Sadly. NabuCasa seems hell bent on not providing any way to be able to browse our own backups with our own passwords since some custom-ish encryption method is used. I cannot untar it and they haven’t provided any backup browsing tools. 
I don’t want to waste the rest of my Sun restoring this backup, just to get the dasshboard and then re-restore the current state. It’s such a monumental waste of time and I had plans for my Sun. Sorry I’m mad. Ugh. My weekends are so precious and I had a lot of TODOs for the my dashboards. Ah well…
Yeah, let me guess - you set your backups as password-protected?
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Yeah, i miss some kind of history (or undo) here, too. There is “undo”, but only if you edit in raw editor.
Going back is not as easy as you’d expect. All backups are encoded-trasnslated into end language, they are not saved in yaml, so you can’t just copy/paste.
(I’m careful not to open multiple dashboard editors in separate tabs, I only have one open)
It’s just other way around: i usually open dashboard i plan to edit and put that tab aside in a separate window (on my second monitor, or i minimize that window). Then i open another chrome instance and make all changes there. Make sure NEVER to press “refresh” on first instance!! (in fact, don’t touch it at all). That way you can save that old view if something goes wrong (open raw editor, make any quick change (like space at the end of line), revert back (CTRL+Z) and hit save).
That said, i usually make a backup of that page myself: i open raw editor and copy/paste entire contents to a special folder where i keep my backups - just make a new notepad file and paste it there. That way you’ll always have saved copy of old dashboard.
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Yes, like any normal person when we have certain passwords baked into the HA installation for various integrations, I think it’s reasonable to protect my backups 
But clearly a huge mistake when it comes to any kind of usability short of wasting 3-4 hours in restoring and re-restoring to get access to some small piece of data from the backup.
I’ll have to follow @Protoncek advice on manually backing up my dashboards before starting any work. As it is right now I’m kind of frozen into indecision. I don’t want to waste my entire Sun on backup restoration and re-restoration but I don’t want to try to recreate what I’ve lost as it’ll take many hours as well. It does make me want to cancel my NabuCasa subscription, however, but of course I’m not going to do that as it’s really dumb, near-sighted behavior. I just need to go outside and forget about HA and leave the entire Living Room DA in a mess until next weekend. Ugh.
Fck it, I’m going to back up now, restore last night’s backup from 9hrs ago, grab what I need from the dashboard, and re-restore from the backup I’m just creating now. Probably the least painful but most time consuming. Total waste of time.
Never again will I touch ANYTHING on my dashboards relying on the fact I have a backups. I’ll be keeping it all in notepad like an animal before each time I start some Dashboard edit. 
Thanks for the help guys. Happy Sunday.
Do yourself a favour and learn from this experience. Periodically, make a manual backup without any password protection & download it locally to your PC.
Even if you do it every couple of months, it’ll be much simpler to revert should you paint yourself into a corner again. You won’t need notepad or anything else - all you’ll need is access to the command line via SSH or similar to restore backups.
Yes, it might seem a bit condescending, but ask me how I know about all this
Summary
I’ve been there and lived to regret it
I don’t know about NabuCasa backups, as i don’t use it (i have my own domain), but i guess that you can make your own local backups beside that, can’t you? Not that they’ll help you in these cases, but things like esphome yaml files are accessible (and restorable) from local backups - just use 7-zip program to extract stored backup (if running windows). I always keep 20 daily backups on my server.
For backups to samba share you can use “Samba backup” addon from here, for instance. I bet you can also make an automation to create daily local backups somehow (like each night at, say, 3am) if you don’t have any share drive (like NAS). It’s a good idea, though to have backups elsewhere, too, not just inside HA (in case HA’s drive dies).
Thanks but I’m fine on that front. I use this amazing community addon that backs up to google drive but also can manage extensively how often you want backups, retention policies, etc. My NabuCasa comment was just frustration and being a brat lol. I use NabuCasa to support the developer and for the integration with google assistant (so I can get the best of both worlds - everything is fully local but if I have internet connection I can use google assistant to control everything. So I no longer have a million “integrations” on the google side - only a single one through nabu casa).
Just finished. Entire thing took over 5 hours. In terms of actual value-added or progress I’ve made on my setup to show for it - ZERO. But at least I’ve done a couple of restores now and I know it works. And I’m going to make heavy use of Notepad any time I make changes to the Dashboard.
The combination of NO ability to undo anything on the UI (i.e. no local versioning in the editor of any kind) and inability to browse password-protected backups means I’ve been more than lucky so far not to hit this and waste so much time in the past.
There is a script somewhere on the forum to decrypt password protected backups.
EDIT: here, https://community.home-assistant.io/t/get-files-from-password-protected-snapshot/245066/16