Hello - I’ve accidentally deleted my main dashboard. I had done a backup 20 minutes before so I went and restored the settings and history but the dashboard did not come back. Is there a way to get a dashboard back or are these just not in a backup or is my backup setup wrong?
I would have thought restoring settings would do it. Update: I assume you refreshed the browser, right?
I probably do this the hard way, but I often want to look back at some file and do the following. I might want to look at a single card in a dashboard, for example.
$ tar -xO -f Automatic_backup_2026.2.0_2026-02-14_04.56_22001604.tar homeassistant.tar.gz | tar -xzO data/.storage/lovelace.dashboard_main
Of course replace with the file you want. And that only works on non-encrypted backups.
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Yes, I’ve refreshed the browser. I don’t really completely understand the HA data and config storage model so I don’t understand how to pick apart the tar and restore a database. I have the backups, so I could do it. Is this documented (formally or informally) anywhere that you know? Thanks!
You did install Samba Share, didn’t you? Samba Share add-on is so basic to maintaining Home Assistant that I think it should be part of the core.
From the console (you do have a keyboard and display plugged into the host computer), enter the following commands:
cd config/.storage
ls -al
Look for a file named: lovelace.lovelace_hasp
Peek at the contents with: cat lovelace.lovelace_hasp
That file contains all of your dashboards. DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE. But if it’s full of yaml code then your dashboards are present. You don’t need to try to recover them from a backup.
Is the lovelace.lovelace_hasp file relatively large? When you peeked into the file contents, did it appear to have all of your dashboards and views?
Yes, I have Samba Share installed, though it’s a lot easier for me to go look at this via SSH. I did that and I have a lot of lovelace stuff, but no lovelace.lovelace_hasp
I’m not sure what the structure of all of these is. Is this documented anywhere? If so I might be able to go back to a previous backup and get the correct dashboard and add it back here.
I don’t know why it’s lovelace_hasp. It should be lovelace.[dashboard_id]. But if you can’t see your deleted dashboard in storage, the only option is to restore it from a backup.
Ah, thank you! Now I get the structure a bit. I looked at the files and, as expected, the dashboard I was looking for was not restored - though the restore said it went fine.
Knowing the structure I manually pulled the dashboard file from the backup and then created an empty dashboard, brought the restored dashboard json in and restarted HA. It’s all back. I’m happy.
Was a great opportunity to learn a little more about the structure of HA, I appreciate the helpful tips!
The contents of the file are just data converted from YAML to JSON.