Hassio-tar.sh - Decrypt Home Assistant backups with near-zero dependencies required

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I wrote a small utility which can decrypt a home assistant backup in a way similar to using tar directly.

You download the binary from releases and you can decrypt your home assistant backups without home assistant available.

The primary use case is recovering your backups from a dead home assistant or inspecting your backups uploaded to the cloud which are encrypted.

See README for details GitHub - samrocketman/home-assistant-decrypt-backup: hassio-tar - A simple utility to decrypt Home Assistant backups similar to plain tar. · GitHub

Example

Example reads encrypted backup on stdin and decrypts on the fly for you to interact with standard tar utility.

mkdir some-addon
tar -xOf your-backup.tar file.tar.gz  | \
  hassio-tar | \
  tar -xzC some-addon

Why another utility?

I realize a lot of people have created python utilities which interact with the encrypted backups copying Home Assistant python code.

I wanted a simple and near-pure bash utility which behaves just like tar. The purpose is to just decrypt the tar for you and then you can use standard tar command to do whatever you want.

6 Likes
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New Release v0.1.0

  • Added project license: Apache 2.
  • Added statically compiled binaries which can be used instead of the shell script.
  • Versioned GitHub releases.
  • Continued support for the shell script in case that’s your preference.

The pre-compiled binaries is now recommended instead of the shell script because they have no dependencies, decrypt in-memory, and performs a SecureTar integrity check. Support for Linux, Mac, and Windows for multiple CPU architectures.

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Hi, do you have somewhere a compiled version for x64/amd64 windows system ?
I just tried to import (within HA 2025.12.3) a encrypted backup snapshot from march 2025 (Core 2025.3.3) that is stored on a NAS. So i pointed to the file with the HA Backup Import feature and…NOPE ! It does not work at all… No error message, no file imported, nothing… Buggy function…
So i need to find something that works to import just a few files from this encrypted backup.
Thanks,
Eddy

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reply to myself in case of…

SMB copied backups will appear in the HA backup list after a core reboot…

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In my post there’s a link to GitHub releases. Windows binaries are there as well.

You have to click “Show all 20 assets” because GitHub UI hides some of them.

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Thanks Sam, i’ll give it a try !

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Many thanks.… I created automated backup and just wanted to review one configfile from some days ago.

Then I needed to learn that someone decided that my backups are no longer my backups because of non-standard ways of doing encryption.

Thats that the Linux/UNIX way of doing things!

Christian

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I have updated the utility to support the latest encryption format.