Of the general guides available, skynet’s is fairly comprehensive
Please be aware I’ve not managed to get it to work as I’m still waiting on a compatible ssd adapter
you meant recorder, right? 
Really ? That’s what you chose to take from that ?
That’s what I did when my last SD card died 
The SD card is only used for booting. After a power-off it worked ok. For a while.
Yes - separately powered drive. I thought that may be a potential problem with USB sticks so used a powered HD. I used some cloning software to copy the original USB backup to the drive so the partitions leave a lot to be desired though!
I’m curious! Which cloning software did you use?
Purely because I use Clonezilla - so many options it may have saved you some partition issues?
Can’t speak of anything other than Home Assistant on venv on Raspbian, but it is literally plug SSD into PC, flash Raspbian to SSD using Etcher or whatever (exact same process as when using an SD Card), enable ssh and any wifi networks as necessary, unplug SSD, plug SSD into Pi, boot, done.
Edit, then install Home Assistant, obviously 
If you took a full nightly image, you could restore everything in 20 mins.
I do full nightly on everything (3 Desktops, Laptop, Unraid Server) and keep for 30 days. And weekly to the cloud.
Why do so many? because it’s automated, i have the storage space, after catastrophic failure i can be up and running again in 20-30 mins.
Game saves and watched status on my HTPC Change daily, as do video projects i work on, on my editing PC.
Oh, phone pictures are automatically synced to Unraid server every night as well
OK wish me luck, Raspbian it is. The thing is nothing ever seems to work first go. Oh well i’m in my 40’s, might as well lose hair for a reason.
Going forward though, now I love HA I would love to see some simpler solutions for simpler people (like me). The setup process isn’t simple, and OpenHab has windows installers, the SD card installer is simple enough but SD isn’t the way. It would be great to run as an android app on an old tablet, this would be battery backed as would an old laptop.
I am still pulling my hair out with samba share at the moment and can’t proceed until I get this working.
I love it but I don’t want a career out of it. 
Make sure to add remote backup options into Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Something that unloads your snapshots onto a remote server. I use: Google Drive Backup.
I tried this on my last setup but it kept sending me round in circles, I will make it priority this time.
Raspbian Buster is solid and reliable.
Be certain you install AppArmor before Docker-CE and Hass.io.
Just a helpful hint.
Which download please, there are 3. I don’t want to assume? Cheers
I’d recommend the version at RaspberryPi.org:
Raspbian Buster with desktop and recommended software
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_full_latest
I have never done any of this so may need some prompts on the way
What pi do you have? You can flash the ssd with HassOS and assuming the drive and adapter are ok, you just boot from usb on a 3b+.
If you’re a Windows user, download the ZIP file, unzip it. Use Balena Etcher (a great little prog!) to write the unzipped image file to an SD card or use Rufus (another great one) to write the unzipped image file to a bootable USB stick.
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Looks like balena etcher will do it, though it has flagged up the size of the drive
edit, used rufus
So the thing about RPis… they are as reliable as the SD card you put in them and the way you treat those cards. I have systems that do almost no disk writes that have been running for years on the same SD card. That has always been the way to do things in embedded systems, pfSense for example used to have a special embedded version of their software designed to run on a CF card that wrote almost nothing locally.
I have started moving systems where I can’t reduce the writes over to the SanDisk High Endurance cards. While they don’t have the lifetime warranty of their other cards, they are supposed to be designed to sustain high levels of write traffic for years without failing.
What I really wish I could do with HassIO is setup a syslog server to offload the majority of the writes. If I could get the docker logs and Hass logs going to my syslog server, I think there would be next to nothing written locally.
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