Little help with backup

Configuration
1

I have used HA for about 6 months now to control my greenhouse. I have had some issues with a Shelly UNI, but HA has been flawless. I am running HAOS 14.2, core 2025.5.3, supervisor 2025.12.3 on a RPi 5. When the 2025.6.x update came out, the release notes stated that you needed to update the EEPROM before installing the update. I chickened out on that so haven’t updated. HA control of my GH is critical.

I have purchased a second RPi 5 with the intention to have an active and standby so that I can update one and still have a fallback. Both RPis have HA installed on a 1 TB SSD imaged with the RPi imager.

I have the backup configured with the Google drive addon. I have 6 backups in Google drive, the most recent was this morning, so that is working well.

I have started reading the doc about migrating to a new hardware platform by restoring a backup and plan to follow that path. I have saved an emergency repair kit to my desktop and my backups are encrypted. The first concern that I have about that is all of my backups are labeled as partial. The second concern that I have is that I think that I will have to copy a Google drive backup to the new RPi but can’t find the destination. It is configured as ‘default’. The third concern that I have is what to restore. Obviously I want the config data and the addons. But if I restore HA/core/supervisor, won’t that overwrite the installed software on the new RPi? I think that I could update all of the installed addons to the latest, which isn’t difficult, I just want to understand the whole process. I have the following questions.

  1. I didn’t deliberately setup Docker, yet it is installed on my active RPi. Is that part of the default installation? I haven’t looked but assume it is also on the new RPi.
  2. How do I configure the backup code to sometimes generate a full backup? I couldn’t find that anywhere in the backup config options. What is the difference (other than about 40 MB) in the data that is stored in each type? I don’t have any media.
  3. Where is the default local directory on the RPi with HAOS for backups? Like I mentioned, it is configured as ‘default’.
  4. Where can I find the HA updates? I remember that the 2025.6.x notes provided commands to update the EEPROM.
  5. I am using Argon 40 Neo 5 cases (both RPis). I updated the EEPROM on the new RPi from Argon 40 as part of setting it up. I don’t know what the EEPROM version is on either RPi. How can I find it?
  6. I entered ‘hardware info | more’ in the HA CLI. It rejected the ‘|’ (not surprised). How can I get a listing that I can actually read? The command output is a huge amount of text that scrolls off of the screen. Is there a way to scroll back or save the output to a text file? I have a USB mouse attached but it doesn’t seem to do anything.

I have skimmed through most of the doc and read details on what seemed immediately pertinent. If I missed something please tell me what and where I should look because I do want to learn how to use HA properly.

TIA!

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I did some more doc reading and found a reference to settings/system/repairs/system info (the 3 dot menu). That indicates that docker is active, at least on my system. That seems to be a default because I didn’t intentionally configure it. Lots of other useful info there also.

I remember finding a post somewhere (I have read too many to keep track) that indicated how to determine which instance of docker was running and the backup directory used is somewhere under there. I will keep searching for that post.