I think it would be nice to have an option to create a bacup image from within Home Assistant.
I’m curious as to your justification for it?
Many of us have suffered an SD Card failure, just go out and download the latest HAOS image and use Raspberry PI imager or Etcher to “burn” it onto the replacement SD Card, and then restore from backup. Creating a custom image really doesn’t gain you much.
The image would already have my backup settings and make the restore faster in my opinion. Also, if I image before any major update no further restoration besides writing the image would be necessary.
I’m sorry, but it just isn’t that simple. I work with enterprise class computer systems, and while some machines are backed up using imaging (for example a server running an application), the one that is a big no-no is any server with a database (and HA in general falls in that category), the reason being is that databases are always active, and a typical imaging process may take a snapshot while the database is being written to, resulting in a corrupt database in the image.
A normal backup process will use the database’s own processes to capture the database in a proper state (much lower risk of corruption), so that it can be restored later.
Ultimately, you’re much better off with the current process of using a clean image and then restoring from backup. It’s much more reliable.
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