I lost my home and all possessions in the Eaton-Altadena fire in Southern California on Jan 8, 2025. I was running HASS on an Odroid and I had more than 350 connected smart devices with dozens of automations, custom dashboards, etc. that I’d built up over years, much of it with help from this community and the discussion boards.
I have created a new home from scratch in our rental with just 3 or 4 devices, but there are some automations, dashboards, and scripts in my old setup I’d like to preserve. I had the system backed up nightly to Google and to Nabu Casa, including the very last one just two hours before the power cut and the house burned. I downloaded the last backup from Nabu to my Mac and unpacked the archive, but inside are tar.gz which I can’t open. How can I see the automations.yaml, configuration.yaml, etc files from my old setup in those backups?
Or is there another way entirely to have two homes in parallel in HASS so I can see all the old stuff in easily readable formats (even if everything is unresponsive and unavailable).
Apple’s own unarchiver can open .tar.gz no problems. I suspect the problem is that your backup is encrypted. You can use a tool such as below to decrypt the backup, but that obviously requires you having stored the key somewhere. If you did not then you probably need to go back to an earlier backup, before HASS 2025.1 where the new backup system made encryption mandatory.
The back-ups will be encrypted. In order to open that you need your key. I hope you have that somewhere…
then opening them with that encryption is not a standard 7zip or tar file like it used to be,but HA has the tool to do it and there are tools available as well.
Yes, but also says “nightly to Google”, which may or may not depending on configured retention still hold older backups predating the switch to mandatory encryption.
then opening them with that encryption is not a standard 7zip or tar file like it used to be,but HA has the tool to do it and there are tools available as well.
Thanks for that @Sir_Goodenough. Yes, my backup was encrypted because it was made on Jan 7, 2025. I keep HA up to date, so I was using version 2025.1.1, and I do have the key. I see the instructions on how to restore a backup, but I am not sure how to simply open the encrypted .tar.gz and access the yaml files, since in my case, I don’t want to restore the backup, just grab relevant code snippets. You mentioned that HA has a tool to do that? I ask so others might have access to elements of their encrypted backup without a Restore operation.
As it turns out, I kept making Google backups as well, and those are not encrypted. It was trivial to extract from that archive, once I realized from this thread that they aren’t encrypted.
To be honest, it would be simpler if I could maintain two instances of HA and be able to log in to my old house even though everything will be unavailable. Discussion boards suggest that is not easily achieved.
In the unencrypted Google backup, I don’t see Dashboard yaml in an obvious place. Anyone know where that might be?