How long should a restore from backup take?

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 8:13am

Hey there,

I have a HA currently running on a 32 bit kernel and wanted to upgrade to 64. Therefore I did a complete backup and downloaded this (this setupup used a supervised installation method done by a friend - just in case thats important).
Now I wanted to run it on an rpi4, so I chose the home assistant os in the official raspberry pi imager and booted it up. I was greated with a onboarding page and uploaded that 8gb backup file. After choosing restore I went away only to come back to an machine not responding.
So I started over and only restored the core 2023.4.6 and it took more than 3 hours, after which I decided to abort and ask for help here. Is that normal to take so long? Is it compatible to use a supervised backup on an haos system or do I have to use supervised again? Is that possible on RPi, it’s not listed on the install page…

Thanks a lot,
4nduril

tom_l · May 2, 2023, 9:10am

~~How long is a piece of string?~~

How big is your backup?

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 9:26am

As mentioned above the backup file is 8gb. The upload is done quite fast, but the restore is taking forever…

tom_l · May 2, 2023, 9:34am

Sorry missed that in all the text.

Can you hook up a monitor and keyboard?

It may show you some information as to what is going on.

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 10:07am

well that’s a good idea… I will definetly try

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 1:00pm

Thanks a lot for clarification.
Is it possible to mount a nfs folder directly to the media location? At the moment I have my nas mounted to the folder frigate nvr uses to store it’s files.

tom_l · May 2, 2023, 4:22pm

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 6:16pm

Well I made it to the cli. Somehow the WebUI got unresponsiv.
In the cli I can use backups to show available backups and it shows only the one I uploaded with about 8gb size, my installed addons and name “Umzug”.
How do I restore from there? backups restore Umzug gives Error: Backups does not exist
In the help example it uses some hex-names to identify a backup, but I don’t see such identifier.

4nduril · May 2, 2023, 9:09pm

ok I found it - slug
When starting the restore with this it finishes way too fast (<5s) and I don’t get an UI. Do I need to set a flag for complete restore?

starryalley · May 5, 2023, 2:11pm

My full backup is 2.4GB and I have waited 2 hours now. WebUI is still unaccessible but the observator URL http://192.168.1.201:4357/ is accessible.

Sometimes it shows connected/supported/healthy but sometimes it shows disconnected and a lot of logs from the past? The log stopped midway seems it’s too long to display properly. This is a fresh install and i am restoring from the full backup I made earlier today.

With a monitor attached, there doesn’t seem to be any signals. I just power cycled the machine and it is still the freshly installed version. Restoring didn’t happen at all.

I’m retrying it again.

4nduril · May 5, 2023, 6:41pm

Well I can confirm that the monitor does not show anything during the restore. The webUI just goes offline. In my case it took more than 3 hours until it returned with a completed restore. So my problem was just my impatience and a lack of progress indicator.

starryalley · May 6, 2023, 11:10am

Thank you for the info. I will find another day to wait 3+ hours then. I also just found out my backup has different version of OS and Core than the latest HA OS install. I should have made sure my current HA is updated to the latest before I proceed.

starryalley · May 6, 2023, 12:05pm

Just found this. Exactly the problem I have: Reddit - Dive into anything

I just manually copied sdcard to SSD and it worked right away. Took me 20min to clone that 64GB sdcard.

skillx · May 28, 2023, 1:59am

Can confirm that all you need to do is have patience and wait. Make sure nothing’s locked up using the observer URL, but other than that, just let it do it’s thing. It took me about 1-2 hours with a 800mb snapshot on an RPi4. I imagine this time would increase quite a bit for larger backups.

crisp · May 30, 2023, 11:09pm

← me when it’s 1 am and I can’t get any lights to turn off. My SSD jumped ship and now I am trying to restore my backup. But it’s taking for ever.

Erik6 · June 5, 2023, 11:15am

FYI: my restore of about 2.5GB took 2,5-3 hours with a SSD.

Too bad there is no indictiation whatsoever except a steady flashing activity led on the RPI4.

Protoncek · July 3, 2023, 11:32am

Is anything new in this regard? My 400MB (only HA, addons, etc…without database) file took good 2 hours to restore, and it’s Intel NUC with i7 cpu with 32GB RAM… it should go darn fast in such powerfull machine (HA restart is under 1min).
I browsed a bit on linux via console while restore was working, and it seems that copying from “unknown location” to final folders is teeeeribly slow… once docker folder increased a few kilobytes per second. So, i guess that something is “broken” inside HAOS or HA…?

Ivo72 · July 16, 2023, 3:09pm

I also did a restore which I decided to abort. First after around two hours, then after reading here after around 4 hours.
I’ve then decided to make a firmware update of my RPi4, as home assistant was offline anyway, as I typically do such firmware updates and as I have a NVMe over USB connected to the RPi4.
After this firmware update, the restore was done already the first time I’ve checked the status, which was around 1-2 hours after starting the restore.
I hesitated to post this as I didn’t make a precise time measurement and as it doesn’t explain to me why e.g. also on other hardware the recovery process takes that long as e.g. here described for Intel NUCs.
But I thought I’ll post it as I’m quite sure that the recovery was much faster in my case after this firmware update. I’ve updated to the latest firmware version and I had a version from 2022 before on my RPi4, but I can’t tell the exact version any more. I didn’t expect such a dependency, otherwise I would have noted this information.

walberjunior · July 17, 2023, 8:24pm

Do you know how do I check the current firmware?
I’m running ha os on an SSD

Edit:

I was able to check the version and update.
I was running a very old version.
It could be a placebo, but at least for the backup it looks like there was an improvement.

tombruno · August 18, 2023, 3:10pm

Yeah. I have same issues on bare metal (BeeLink Mini PC) and on KVM on a NUC i7. On the NUC it takes about 45 minutes. Nothing special about the backup (300mb). On the VMs even longer and they are just bare-bones dev/test instances (90mb max).

I had to learn patience but there is a problem with the restore function.