Fresh Install - Can't Restore Config (Unknown Error)

Installation
1

I have a number of recent backups - just realized that something must be off, since the sizes are so different.

Screenshot 2025-03-01 at 9.43.29 PM
Screenshot 2025-03-01 at 9.43.29 PM1523×1048 175 KB

I haven’t tried every single one, but I keep getting “Failed to start restore. Unknown error.” Yeah, that’s all it gives me.

I’m getting this with all the files I’ve tried. Where do I go from here?

2

While searching for info on this, I’m finding out about the three flavors of HA. I’ve never used that or knew about it before. I used just plain “Home Assistant” on the Raspberry Pi Imager. Could that be the problem? Did it download Green? And from what it says, can Yellow go on a microSD card or not?

3

How many?

There are four install methods:

Core,
HA OS,
Supervised,
Container.

For HA OS, there are many different disk images depending on the hardware:

  "hassos": {
    "ova": "14.2",
    "rpi2": "14.2",
    "rpi3": "14.2",
    "rpi3-64": "14.2",
    "rpi4": "14.2",
    "rpi4-64": "14.2",
    "rpi5-64": "14.2",
    "yellow": "14.2",
    "green": "14.2",
    "tinker": "14.2",
    "odroid-c2": "14.2",
    "odroid-c4": "14.2",
    "odroid-m1": "14.1",
    "odroid-m1s": "14.1",
    "odroid-n2": "14.2",
    "odroid-xu4": "14.2",
    "generic-x86-64": "14.2",
    "generic-aarch64": "14.2",
    "khadas-vim3": "14.2"

This is not your issue. If you had the wrong image installed it would not boot.

4

So if I’ve just used the standard download on RasPi Imager in the past, which version should I use now?

I’ve been using this Samba Backup add-on for a long while and I haven’t had problems restoring the config in the past.

I’m also wondering if there could be an issue with the Pi. I had to do a reinstall because the last setup went bad. When I checked the console output, I had one error repeat over and over, scrolling so fast I could barely read, but it was a write error. I figured if I just re-installed on a new microSD card, I could restore a backup from the past week, but since I can’t even load one, even the earliest one on the screenshot I included, I’m wondering if there could be a problem with the Pi overall.

5

Did you change to the new backup system rather than Samba Backup?

6

Ah!

Did not know there’s a new backup system.

And I had forgotten the Samba backup system was separate. Just realized I could try to restore through that.

So does the new backup system make it easy to backup on an NAS?

7

I have not tried the new system yet as it does not offer the full features that Samba Backup does. Particularly it does not yet:

  1. Have a sensor you can use for backup running/success/fail notifications, or
  2. Allow saving different numbers of backups locally and remotely. I save 7 locally and 30 on my NAS.

Until those features are available I’m sticking with Samba Backup.

8

Agree 100%. I am NOT going to depend on a back on the system being backed up. Not for HA, not for my firewall, not for ANYTHING. The whole point of a backup is to have that data safe in case the system fails. Why keep it on the failed system?

I haven’t had to work with the HA config in a good while and don’t remember every detail of HA, pfSense, OctoPrint, RasPiOS, and all the other systems I use, so it took me a while to work through this. I installed Samba Share, then realized that was thee add-on to just provide a SMB share on the HA system, so I went looking for the Samba backup. I forgot I could add a repository and that made me wonder if I had used something not available for the “level” of HA I had installed.

When I found the page I linked to above, the pieces fell into place. I installed that add-on and restored from my NAS. Now it’s working.

I look forward to when the included backup feature allows backing up to a network share.