There should be a “Restore From Backup” option right on the initial Welcome screen. Did you get that screen, and try that option?
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F’in hell. What UX genius made that design decision? Three times I didn’t even notice that, I’ll give it a shot. Thanks.
Wait. Nope. How are you getting that option? It turns out I’m not completely braindead, I was right the first three times… I don’t have that restore option on mine. How did you turn that on?
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Hold it. According to Restore from Backup on New Installation - HA Core - #3 by CentralCommand
If you are looking for a backup and restore process for a core-only installation or to migrate between two core-only installations then you must set one up yourself.
So there is literally no way to migrate a core installation (I have no idea how to “set one up myself”, since directly copying the files doesn’t work, and I got into this to use HA but not to wind up coding it.) I thought I was joking about the “backup” feature being one-way, backup-only, without the ability to ever restore, but according to this guy, who is the only person I’ve found online who actually seems to understand this process, that’s the actual literal truth of it. There is no restore feature.
This is some of the worst design I’ve ever seen. My faith that HA is worth spending time on just bottomed out. It broke through the bottom, and hit a whole new bottom underneath that I didn’t even know existed.
So, once my Mini 9 finally bites the dust, that’ll be the end of Home Assistant for me. People need to be able to migrate their settings to another machine, not be stuck forever on whatever machine they first built their starter system on. Anything else is not practical for real-world use.
Especially as, I don’t mind having to put work in myself on setting up a FOSS project, but the fact that it took me an entire afternoon out of my day to even discover that this problem exists, shows that this is too chaotic and poorly designed an ecosystem to rely on. Every aspect of this seems to be mired in confusion and incomprehensibility.
This is really just extremely, extremely disappointing.
Thinking out loud… maybe I can just clone the current hard drive to an image and spin up a debian machine in vitrualbox and without having to change anything. Still, I don’t think I want to bog my mac server machine down running virtualbox 24/7, that seems inefficient.
It seems like the only practical answer is to enjoy it until my Mini 9 finally crosses the Rainbow 802.1D Bridge and then go back to using electric light switches.
Core installations are aimed at very advanced users, and Core clearly doesn’t support managed restores - it’s up to you. Only about 3% of the installed base is using Core, and for them, a totally manual backup/restore process is a feature not a bug. Is there a particular reason you are using Core? Use and support of this system is so much simpler using HA OS.
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I looked for install instructions for Mac, followed them, and core is what I wound up with (two different sets of instructions, actually, and they were similar enough that I figured they were the way to go.)
I did try HA OS once, a long time ago, and yes, “simpler” would be one word for it, sure 
. Aside from the fact that I’m not going to take the performance hit of perpetually running virtualbox on this machine, HA OS seemed so locked-down and limited, there was no way to do the very things I had wanted HA for… like, the very first night I hit so many brick walls, I uninstalled it and never looked back. It just wasn’t even usable. If HA OS on a Mac had worked for me, I never would have wiped my Mini 9 Hackintosh to install Debian & HA to begin with.
Against my better judgement, since my last post, I did try another complete system reinstall to clear everything out, and installed the versions of Python and Home Assistant that are working on the Debian machine, then installed again and copied all the config files over, just to see. Still no dice.
I think HACS may be involved… don’t even get me started. If HA seems blissfully ignorant of the need of users to occasionally migrate to a new server without having a Home Assistant Engineering PhD, HACS seems downright hostile to it. There’s simply no way (that I can find in several hours of searching, at least) to install it at all if you’re trying to migrate a previous version of HA, as is, without introducing breaking changes. It forces you to first upgrade everything to more recent version than the last one I know works, with no previous version that might be compatible with HA versions more than about 5 months old available anywhere I can find.
I’m not going to troubleshoot a forced upgrade to a version that is not confirmed working with my current setup, so this whole endeavor has now come to an unproductive end exactly where it started two days ago: with me running HA on a dying Mini 9 and looking balefully at a perfectly good extra Mac sitting here without my HA install on it.
I’m not clear why the options are so limited. I can’t be the sole person who hoped to use HA who is neither a complete newbie who requires a totally locked-down and inflexible software appliance, nor, an expert HA developer who wants to spend his time coding the features he needs completely from scratch himself.
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No SW engineer or business would be crazy to implement rare use cases like what you are suggesting.
Simply put, if you do not have the skill stick to HAOS, otherwise you are on your own with a bit of help from the HA community, but nothing more than that.
Nobody has the time or the money to cater to marginal use cases. HAOS is SW for smart home automation, not a general purpose OS, plus you can do more with HA comparing to any other similar platform. Alternatively you could consider Node-RED.
You want freedom? Use a hypervisor or supervised installation, not a core installation.
The speed difference between HA deployment methods is marginal. It is more important you do not use a compute potato to deploy HA.
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Sorry, but, it sounds like you didn’t maybe read my comments. “crazy”? “rare use cases”? “general use os”? What? At first I thought you were replying to someone else, it sounds like you read a lot into my comments that isn’t there.
I don’t understand what is “rare” or “marginal” about wanting to take my working installation and move it to from one Unix OS to another newer and more powerful machine on a Unix OS*. In my 25 years as an IT consultant, I’ve definitely run across that need a few times. (*you do know MacOS is just a proprietary GUI running over a certified Unix flavor, right?) Or about turning to FOSS because I want something flexible, but which doesn’t require me fully coding important features completely from scratch.
Is being able to restore my settings from a backup, or otherwise migrate them between installations, really that outlandish an idea to you? You know an overwhelming majority software packages that have more than a very small handful of configuration settings have ways of backing up and restoring them, right? And that usually, when you make a backup, it’s for something other than just taking up space on your disk? None of this is something that any software engineer would balk at implementing.
I do understand that Macs are a very small share of the market, but nonetheless I don’t think supporting them is “crazy”, especially as I install plenty of other Unix software ports and other than HA it all runs on Mac’s Unix underpinnings with few troublesome issues, and pretty much no unsurmountable ones. From what I’ve seen, plenty of my fellow SW engineers have the time or money to make software that works according to very common conventions and general common sense about usability, and to document it. Even FOSS software. Even stuff that is ported to Macs. It’s really not crazy at all, or some sort of rare edge case.
I don’t know whether you’re calling me a “potato” (you know what, I actually listed my career credentials here at first, but decided I don’t need to get that pompous), in which case your opinion is, uh, noted, or calling Macs a “potato”, in which case, all I can say is, so far everything else I’ve needed in the last couple of decades runs on them, including using them as servers of all different stripes, so they must be somewhat more computationally powerful than a tuber.
Last week, on a Mac with lower specs than the one you’re calling a “potato”, I set up a full Apache/MySql/PHP8/Wordpress stack with several domains running as virtual hosts, and that machine also runs a dedicated database server for my own software that does automated imports and data-heavy trade processing from my stock broker via API every day, and, also, clunky ThinkOrSwim desktop software that I use manually for a couple of hours on it every weekday by screensharing in via one of the three different remote desktop protocols I’ve got running on it (I can’t afford not to be able to remote in, so I need redundancy.) That’s all running at the same time, with no problems at all. So, calling a higher-spec machine than that a “compute potato” is, in my view, perhaps misinformed.
Meanwhile, for several years I’ve had HA running successfully on a 2008 Dell Mini 9 with a teeny little Dell low-power Atom CPU, 1GB ram, and a 32GB SSD hooked up via USB, pretty much a glorified pocket calculator. Given that experience, I have a hard time understanding why someone would claim a 2.5 GHz dual-core i5 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB internal SSD is too much of a “potato” to run just HA and its dependencies, all alone, with nothing else installed besides the stock OS. Something about that just doesn’t sit right, somehow.
If you ask me, the Mini 9 actually, literally, has not much more computing power than an actual potato that you’d cut open and melt butter and cheese into. Yet I’ve had HA controlling my smart bulbs on that for a few years, so maybe tuberosity isn’t reeeeeeally a problem for running HA?
And, as to not wanting to roll to a new version and a new server at the same time, that’s not unusual either. Anyone who’s ever done a lick of troubleshooting knows that you isolate your variables. You don’t migrate AND upgrade in one fell swoop, you do first one, make sure it’s all good, then the other. That’s not “crazy”, that called “having had way too much experience with IT”. And if you google for it, you’ll also see it’s not only not “rare” but incredibly common for people to need older versions of software packages, too. Sorry, but it’s just not something most people consider unserviceably out-of-the-ordinary.
And even by those standards, me running a 9-month-old release instead of this month’s version is just not that extreme a case. The “old version” I’ve been talking about, that in HA world is being treated like it’s so archaic it’s unthinkable anybody could ever have a reason to still be using it, is 2023.1.7. Call me crazy but I don’t think 10 months of backwards compatibility is really so outlandish a request.
None of this is as weird as you’re trying to claim. Maybe in HA-world, but not anywhere else.
As to the other versions: I followed what instructions I could find. I’m open to instructions on how to get hypervisor or a supervised installation running on a Mac, if that will allow me to migrate my existing working install to a machine that’s likely to outlast as Mini 9 that’s almost as old as my last girlfriend. I’m just concerned that that ancient hardware isn’t going to run forever, and now I have a spare MacBook Pro sitting here which, until you just corrected me, I didn’t think it was that unheard-of to want to port my configuration over to. Although it does seem silly to me that there’s this one Unix app, the only one I’ve ever run across myself, that can’t run on the Mac’s Unix underpinnings, and demands virtualization. Unix multimedia production apps can be ported to Mac, you can get generative AI running on Macs, but a Python home automation app can’t control a couple of smart bulbs without setting up a whole virtual machine for it? Ok.
In fact, I wasn’t going to mention this because I didn’t want to bog this thread with what would have felt like it was getting too far off-topic, but, since you suggested exactly this:
In fact, after my last comment, before I saw your diatribe, I did head over to MacOS - Home Assistant to give another shot to HA OS running in VirtualBox, just to give a less “crazy” and potatoey method another fair shake, and see if the limitations still seem like showstoppers.
So, yes, I’ve now tried HA OS.
INB4: I followed the instructions to the letter. Once I had, I went back over them, sentence by sentence, double- and then triple- and quadruple-checked all the settings and instructions they give, to be completely sure I hadn’t misread or overlooked anything. I also confirmed that wifi is off and the machine is accessible over the network through the ethernet cable. I now have VirtualBox (a system I’m familiar with from work, by the way, I wasn’t going in cold) configured, verbatim from their instructions, using the vdi image they supplied.
So. Here’s HA OS on Mac, as provided by carefully following the official documentation:
I’ll forgo a sarcastic comment here. I did think of a few good ones, though.
Still open to working instructions for any kind of solution if anyone has got them, but as far as calling me or my computer a vegetable, or telling me what I’m asking for is too “crazy” in your opinion, or anything else that doesn’t contribute to getting my working HA install migrated to my Mac, I’m going to try to resist the urge to reply to any more of it.
I’ll have a look at Node-RED, I’m not familiar with it. Thanks for the suggestion.
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Run it in a KVM, unless you consider Oracle SW standards compliant.
My objective was not to hurt your feelings, rather to point out RTFM prior to deploying anything.
Honestly, running HA on a Mac for production use is a very rare usecase and totally understandable that the dev resources are not focused on this. Most of the issues or lacking feature support is documented. Since you seem to be experienced in the IT world, you should understand that there is a never 100% guarantee for application to work when moving from one platform to another. But hey, how about contributing your year long knowledge to make the whole solution better every day? Which part of the code has been provided by you?
I recommend stopping your ranting and buy yourself a boxed hardware solution. If it is homeassistant or anything else is up to you.
Hey guys! I suffered a lot with this too. I found the necessary options on the interface, but it always said that the file format was not suitable, even though I had saved it under the exact same version 2 minutes earlier, even the rPI4 was the same, only the card was different.
It turned out that doing this under Firefox worked with the Chrome browser. It’s completely incomprehensible because the upload goes smoothly under Firefox in other cases.
it is fine, as it runs in a docker container
Where are you getting 3% from? The newest numbers I could find where these from 2021 (100,000 installations in analytics! - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)) that has 5% on core and another 18% on Container which also doesn’t have restore support and is, in my opinion, a significantly simpler setup than running it in a VM which 33% of users do. Plus, both of those also don’t have support for connecting to Network Storage for backups seemingly only because the storage page was originally intended for local storage and never had that updated. It just feels like things get needlessly limited to HAOS.
See the first link in the article you referenced for current data: https://analytics.home-assistant.io/
To be technical about it, as of latest data it’s 2.93% on Core, 15.57% on Container and 4.66% on Supervised. The vast majority (73.73%) is on HAOS.
Judging by both your 2021 numbers and the lowering incline of the graph for anything other than HAOS, I’d say those “other” installation methods are diminishing rapidly as a percentage of total installations.
With the popularity of hypervisors like Proxmox on the rise for those who do not want a full bare metal install, as well as the ability to connect Network Storage for backups & media (yes, it has been updated, read up on it), I’d say focusing on HAOS would be a good decision from a dev perspective.
trying to move HA from ESXi set up with the ova file in 2019 to PROXMOX
my ESXi HA ist latest stable ver 12.xxx I install the install a new HA as VM on PROXMOX, so far so fine.
Did a full backup on the ESXi and uploaded it on the correct prompt of the startup screen after the new installation, did the upload.
But the importing screen never finished even afer a whole night.
the “ha core logs” shows a lot of error, core rebuild etc. an reboot does not change much
I can ping ip address port 8123 is open, but browser gets not data
I am an IT professional sind 40 years but can not figure out whats wrong here.
I like to migrate my ESXi version to PROMXMOX, should be the easiest way, but it does not start. All my 10 other then Linux and Windows machines could be migrated without any problem.
So can any show me a way to get myquit complex HA config to the new server
Thanks
I don’t have experience with PROXMOX, but I recently moved my HA core installation to a new location on the same machine.
Initially it did not work using a simple “cp” command on the directory (HA started with the new user welcome screen). However, using rsync with the “-a” flag set did work. HA restarted using the new directory as if nothing happened. It could have been a permissions preservation issue or missed hidden files, but worth checking your method of copying.
Hi Dennis,
Did you find a fix for this?
I seem to be facing the same issue. Migrated from raspi to an odroid N2+. All addons (drive backup, Z-wave, mosquitto, SSH, …) refuse to start and/or update.
Thanks in advance!
Actually, funny thing… I didn’t migrate at all after running into numerous issues like I outlined, so I put that on hold. So now, months later, I have two options that I might move into, and I’ll update with what I decide to do:
- I have a Pi 5 with an NVME drive attached, and it’s running HA but not doing anything.
- I also have a small mini-PC that’s more powerful than the Pi but it’s Intel based, so that might be challenging.
I’m shooting for #2 since it’s a nice new PC that I am not using (sort of like a NUC) and I’d rather have it run on that although I’m sure the Pi5 would do just fine (I mean, the system I have now is all running fine on a Pi 4 as far as I can tell).