Agreed. On my NUC with i7 restore takes as long as 3-4 hours, while CPU doing basically nothing (load is a few percent).
I recently decided to switch from a cheap 128GB SSD back to a more expensive 256GB SD card and I gave up using the restore function. I just can’t wait that long.
I simply use balenaEtcher to copy the whole disk. It was quicker and always work.
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Yeah, well, that’s possible in your case, but not if something goes wrong. In this case only restore helps, or even worse: reformat SSD, reinstall HA and only then do a restore.
I really wonder what on earth takes sooooo loooong… ??
I just spent the last couple hours getting to the point of a restore onto a newly upgraded Samsung EVO SSD. I then hit this “I wonder how long this will take” point after seeing the restore without a progress indicator. Googling/searching, I found the comments above.
I abandoned the restore and took the advice of @starryalley above: took everything back a few steps to a basic balenaEtcher to clone and I’m now up and running 30 mins later. Everything looks okay and I was able to test a kitchen switch, but will spend a little more time validating the restore. So far it appears okay and I’m now seeing the bigger available disk space. I thought I would have to go back and do some manual additional steps to expand a drive or something, but it appears to be okay.
Talk about easy! Great tip. Skip the backup and restore from backup!
Restoring from an NUC to an Unraid VM - Backup is about ~750mb
Running on a N6005 Unraid VM since ~60 minutes. Fingers crossed that this will work. Seems like it’s only utilising 1 core out of 4 from the VM while restoring.
Please upvote this feature request:
7 Likes
Voted for that feature request. My HA installation went somehow broken after trying to update to 2023.9.3, HA never woke up after update. Then the basic turn power off - turn power on didn’t help either, said my HA IP address was unreachable. So, since nothing else to do, I did that classic balenaEtcher to my SSD (I have RP4 with SSD), and then at least I got life to my HA IP address again with that omboarding process. Uploaded my full backup from last night (1,9 GB) and it’s still restoring after one hour. Seems like I need to wait at least 2 hours more… But giving us some info, if not progress bar, at least something else than forever running circle…
OS 11 broke one of my HACS integrations so trying to roll back with the latest backup. 6.5 gig. Now 4.5 hours and counting!! Fingers crossed…
Edit:
Took 8 hours and then realizing that the backup of course doesn’t include the os 
So after 8 hours spent for nothing and 5 mins to downgrade the os (from cli, ha os update --version 10.5) everything is fine!
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Which integration was broken?
Hassio plejd.
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After 4 hours I gave up restoring a complete 750MB backup to a sd-card on an Odroid N2+.
A bit more information about the restoring process would be greatly appreciated (already voted for the progress indicator feature request).
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I think you gave up just before end… 
Although i support progress indicator i’d rather vote for solving this slow process and have faster restore… I can confirm that it’s definitely not machine problem, since restore took a good 4 hours on i7 6x series NUC with 32GB of ram, running HAOS.
It is a process problem. It takes far less time to restore manually the core component.
If you search Github for one of the issues which was created regarding the slow restore, then you will find a description how to manually restore core in 5 minutes to a working order.
aha… sound great, but… there’s over 2000 “cases” for core alone… do you have some links by any chance?
If you think using the search for me is easier than for you, then you are absolutely wrong! And you should do a favour!
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Well, that depends on your and my knowledge of english, resulting in finding correct words for searching…
Thanks for the link, although it’s more for cases when HA doesn’t work anymore, not for cases when it works, but a person wants to go back for various reasons (like one integration not working after update). And it’s hardly 5 minutes of work… just reinstall HA takes more than that. But, it’s less than 4 hours, that part is true.
You must be a mathematician!
You can restore core by reverting the image to an older one (which you wanted to restore) and restoring the files through the ssh addon from the backup. You don’t have to reinstall HA.
But all it is an overcomplicated manual process which I do not advise, unless you really know what you are doing.
Until the issue is fixed. You should stay with restoring backups the official way!
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Yeah, luckily it doesn’t happen often. Although i never reverted HA manually i did “go back” once or twice “official” way, i just ran restore before going to bed and in the morning all was ok. I do some basic linux stuff every now and then, but that’s all. I agree, it’s complicated and easy to do even more damage.
(and, sorry, not mathematician, true electronicyst…)
It meant to be a reference to a classic joke:
A physicist and mathematician are tasked with making tea, they’re provided with a kettle, a water tap, stove and tea leafs each.
They both fill up their kettle, put it on the stove to boil then add the tea.
The next day they are tasked with the same but provided with an already filled kettle.
The physicist goes about with boiling the water but the mathematician simply dumps out the water from his kettle and exclaims “Now we we’re back to the hypothesis of the first problem which was previously solved!”
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Unexpected surprise:
- HA system on Rpi4 suddenly did not start any more.
- (re)Imaged (same) SSD with fresh HA installation
- Vanilla HA system started, asking to be setup or restore from backup
- Backup (2023.10 or .11, only 170Mb) chosen and waiting for restore to finish. In the meantime reading here it could take very long.
- Did not have the time, so powered of the RPI after approx 30min and no progress to see.
- Checked to see in what expected broken status the system would (re)start
But all was OK! No missing integrations, devices or Lovelace setup, all there. Seems like the restore was finished (ok?) but “forgot” to tell the busy-restoring notification in the browser.
It’s still fresh, so maybe something will pop up later. And/or maybe this N=1 is a pure coincidence…
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