Fresh installation and restore of configuration

Hello!

I have been a satisfied user of Home Assistant for a number of years. However, over time, things sometimes go wrong in my configuration. Sometimes it is through your own fault and sometimes something simply goes wrong that cannot be repaired. I then want to go back to a fresh installation (no backup), but I do want to restore everything as it was.

I would like to propose a feature that creates a file (or insights) at the touch of a button that provides insight into all important matters.

Automations are the most important. I would like the YAML code but also a visual representation as shown in the visual editor (for understanding).

Other things that can also be in this file:

  • List of installed Integrations
  • List of installed HACS Integrations
  • List of installed Addons
  • Copy config file
  • Copy Quirks
  • Dashboards (Visual and YAML)
  • API codes used (with Integrations)
  • Helpers
  • People (configured in HA)

Or is this feature already somewhere in Home Assistant?

I think it is in fact called a backup.

2 Likes

I think it’s more of a user thing what they (might) want to document or not regarding their setup. And the rest as already pointed out is making sure you have a backup of the relevant stuff.

All of this is available in a backup.

Ensure you are automatically saving backups off your system. There are a number of ways to do this listed in point 5 here: https://www.home-assistant.io/getting-started/configuration/#creating-a-backup

If you do a backup then all is backed up right? So if there is a fault in the system that is not possible to correct you keep the fault.

Which is why you keep more than one backup. Go back to the one before the “fault” occurred.

The problem is over time i have useually more than one fault or things not working. Or i followed a complicated tutorial to achieve some things that in the end did not work but it is difficult to reverse those steps…

And sometimes i added or changed much and if i revert back to a backup than i do not know what exactly changed.

I have this problem. I don’t document what I did. Then wonder what all this crap is for…

The backups can be opened with common compression tools, like for Windows it could be Winzip, 7-Zip or WinRAR.
MAcOS probably have similar or because it is based on Linux, then GZIP and TAR, which are the ones HA use.

When opening the files you can extract the parts you want.
You could also make changes in the files and overwrite the ones in the backups to remove errors, but you would have to be careful though.