I accidentally destroyed the SD card on my Home Assistant RPi by unplugging it without shutting it down first. Fortunately, I have a full snapshot of the day before I destroyed it, so I tried installing home assistant again on a new SD Card, and tried to restore the snapshot.
Initially, I tried on the actual setup screen of Home Assistant. This didn’t work, I would upload the snapshot, and the webpage would just show the loading icon. I tried this a few times, and the result was the same each time. It seems that the RPi was rebooting after it tries to parse the uploaded snapshot, because the green LED on the Pi stays solid green for a while (Web UI goes offline at this time), and the Pi seemingly reboots after a while, because when the web page is refreshed, I’m back at the initial setup page.
I then tried to set up a user account, and went to the snapshots page, and tried to manually upload a snapshot. Same result. The RPi seemingly reboots, and when I navigate to the Snapshot page again, the uploaded snapshot isn’t there.
Some suggestions would be welcome. Random things around the house have stopped working because no home assistant lol.
Oh wow it seems I picked a terrible time to break Home Assistant.
For option 1, I think that is the method that I have described in my original post. As I have detailed, I have already tried that, and it exhibits the same behaviour as when I try to upload a snapshot when initialising the home assistant instance.
However, I installed the SMB share add-on, and directly copied my snapshot into the /backup directory of home assistant. This made the snapshot actually appear in the snapshot menu of the supervisor. I clicked on it, then on restore. Based on the indicator LEDs on the RPi, the snapshot is being restored right now.
If it ends up fully working, I will provide an update.
Success! I’ve managed to restore the snapshot by copying it directly to the /backup directory of Home Assistant, and restoring from there. (Just to re-iterate for anyone in the future, I first had to make a dummy account, as @Tinkerer suggested.)
Worth noting that the restoration process took a really long time (1+ hrs), but I would hazard a guess this was due to my SD card, which is really basic and doesn’t have any sort of speed rating.