Issues after restoring from an image backup

I had Home Assistant running fine for a couple of years, always kept updated. After a couple power outages, HA failed to start. I suspected SD card corruption, so proceeded to restore from a backup (which was pretty old, because I hadn’t edited much in the panels).
The restored system wouldn’t boot, so I assumed SD card hardware failure. So I restored the backup to a new card (the new card is 32GB, while the image is 8GB, but that’s usually no problem).
Upon starting, I had a problem with the supervisor not starting. I made it start by refreshing it using the CLI. Then I was able to access the web server.
Of course there were many updates pending. I proceeded to update the core to the latest version: it took about 15 minutes, which seemed quite long, but apparently succeeded.
Now I started the OS update (from 8.1 to 8.5) and it’s been updating for more than 50 minutes. It’s not hung because the activily led on the PI shows activity; and the CLI works.
If I try to launch the OS updater from the CLI, it says that there’s another job running (understandably).
Is it normal to take such a long time after a restore from backup? I don’t want to interrupt the process, in case I’m left with a non-functional system. But I don’t know how long I’m supposed to wait.

On a related topic: I really don’t want to deal with 32GB images for the backups, so I was planning to only clone the first 8GB from the SD to the PC (I use dd on linux). But I’m wondering, does HA keep the filesystem as it is during updates, or does it “inflate” it to fill the newly available space? In this case the partial cloning wouldn’t work…

RPi is not a speed daemon. Everything takes a loooong time to complete. I suggest patience, especially on operations related to storage.

Thank you, it’s just that it seemed much slower than usual. Anyway after several sequential updates to OS 10.3, it seems to be back to normal again…