Well my weekend has gone terribly wrong. I’m no longer able to access HA via the web interface.
How it happened…
I was editing some config in configuration.yaml and creating automations attempting to set up some actionable notifications for my Konnected alarm panel and HA became unresponsive. I performed a factory reset on the Green by holding the button while connecting power and got the onboarding screen. I started the restore process and the onboarding screen continued to display restoring. Checked the forums here and that seems to be expected, once the restore starts no further update is provided and you need to attempt to access the web ui until it comes back. I left it overnight however and still no progress by morning. The backup file tar downloaded from the cloud service is only approx 120mb so not a huge restore.
I performed another factory reset this morning to attempt the restore again (my idea was to restore core only) but now I’m stuck not even able to access the onboarding. Connecting the HDMI port to a display I can see the HA CLI, OS version 14.1/core 2025.1.2 and the expected IP is shown but neither http://192.168.1.100:8123 or http://homeassistant.local:8123 are accessible. I’ve also tried https versions and still no joy. I can ping the ip and homeassistant.local and get responses. I can also access the observer URL on the IP and home assistant.local host names.
Where do I go from here? Thanks!
Update: If I use the SD card reset method I can get back to the onboarding screen but restore always fails with no info. It just carries on with the “Restore in progress” spinner and loading :8123 in another tab is unresponsive. The HDMI output doesn’t change from the HA command line ha > prompt at any point.
Was the backup taken before, or after you’d made configuration changes? It’s a long shot, but if the backup contains an error in a config file, that might cause the restore to fail.
To test this theory, skip the restore step in the onboarding process and just let it continue with a default install. Then run the restore from within that. If that kills it, you know the problem is in the backup file.
Or better still, once you have a stable, default install, copy the .yaml files that you’ve changed recently, one at a time, back to the config directory. Run Developer Tools / Check Configuration each time.
Thanks. The backup was definitely done before the error. It was done using the new cloud backup. I’ll try a default install and see what happens. I did just run a config check from the command line with core check and it reported some certificate related errors. I didn’t note them down but if I keep getting stuck I’ll come back to that. I’ll try with no addons too.
I think I’m going to need to give up on this. I’ve been able to decrypt the backup at least so I have access to my automations and yaml but very annoyingly it looks like I’m going to need to do a lot of repairing of zigbee devices.
I’ve learned a lot about HA in the last few 24 hours however so at least I should be more prepared in case it happens again. I think if I had SSH/Samba set up before the issue I could have restored the yaml without resorting to a restore.
Totally agree, Samba and SSH are the first things to set up on every new install.
The HA config directory is just another directory on my laptop to me. I can edit, copy and move files there easily. I can include that share as just another place which I back up or sync. The only time I’d ever need a “regular” HA backup would be after a failed upgrade or migrating to new hardware, because I always have archival copies of all my .yaml files in several locations.