Native Backup Schedule vs. Google Drive Backup Add-on

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I’m currently running Home Assistant on a Home Assistant Yellow and looking to streamline my backup strategy. I’ve really been in a set it & forget it with Home Assistant for awhile but just started reviewing some of my confiugraiton.

Right now, I have the native daily backups enabled (System > Backups), but I also use the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on to ensure I have off-site copies. This results in two separate “Full Backups” being created every day.

Is there any harm or performance impact in running two full backups daily?

Can the Google Drive Add-on simply “watch” the native backup folder and upload the core-generated backups, rather than it triggering its own separate snapshot?

What is the recommended best practice? Should I disable the native HA schedule and let the Google Drive add-on manage both the local retention and the cloud upload?

I just did some “spring cleaning” to clear out about 20GB of old manual backups, so I’m trying to keep things lean and automated moving forward.

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I interpret the ‘321 Backup rule’ as having at least 3 copies, created with at least 2 separate methods and storage media, and at least 1 of the copies offsite.
Sounds close to what you have. There are other interpretations of the ‘321 rule’, but the theme is the same.

The Built-in HA backup happens in the 4AM hour. As long as you are not working the system too hard, the extra backup will not be noticed.

I have an rsync copy on a local drive on another computer, an HA backup local and the cloud, and another addon backup up to another local drive. There may be a google back-up addon still running, but I don’t remember.

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I use a local backup, nabu casa and Google for similar reasons

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good thinking, applying 321 to computer systems. Thanks!

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