To the best of my understanding, the recorder: option only saves historical data of entities to an external database.
And all the actual data, configuration, etc, are written in the .storage directory.
Is there a way to configure Home Assistant to save all it’s data to an external database, like mariadb or postgres?
For example uptime-kuma asks for a database info during setup, and writes everything there.
Can I do this with HA?
Not all, no. Only the state and statistics data (recorder data) can be saved to a different database.
See: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/recorder/#custom-database-engines
Any idea if there are any plans to implement an external database feature? It seems strange to me tha such a huge project doesn’t support this. It’s almost 2026. Who writes to files?
Look at the influxdb and grafana add ons for external storage of metric and events and advanced dashboard trickery.
That said, .storage has the advantage of being quite solid.
It’s also not true that HA doesn’t use a database, see Database - Home Assistant
Home Assistant uses databases to store events and parameters for history and tracking
That’s it though. events and parameters for history. Whereas it could store device information, automations, scripts, scenes, tokens, and basically all the information. My point is, if an external database was used, .storage would not be needed.
You mentioned grafana, which I use to create dashboards, and this is it’s configuration. I don’t even have to mount a volume. Everything goes into mariadb. I can delete the container and re-create it, and I wouldn’t lose a single byte.
grafana:
image: grafana/grafana
container_name: grafana
hostname: grafana
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
- PUID=1001
- PGID=1001
- TZ=Europe/Nicosia
- GF_DATABASE_TYPE=mysql
- GF_DATABASE_NAME=grafana
- GF_DATABASE_USER=grafana
- GF_DATABASE_PASSWORD=grafana
- GF_DATABASE_HOST=mariadb:3306
- GF_AUTH_ANONYMOUS_ENABLED=true
ports:
- 3000:3000
depends_on:
mariadb:
condition: service_healthy
