Piper 2.5.2 bloats backups

Configuration
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1

I got an email from Google telling me my Google Drive has reached > 50%.
Thought it was odd, so I had a look and I noticed the Home assistant backups had gone up a lot after updating HA to 2026.9.3 and Piper to 2.5.2

Before: 135Mb
After: 2.66Gb

Fairly quickly figured out that it was Piper by pulling the smaller backup to compare.
Piper before: 64Kb
Piper after: 2.5Gb

Looking at the change log I could see that they’re now using omnivoice as well as the downloaded voices, so I think they may have moved some folders around which made the voice models available to be pulled into the backups where they were excluded/ignored before.
Our Proxmox VM image is the same size, so the logic seems right.

I counted all the models it works out at about 3Gb uncompressed.

Workaround for now is to copy the Piper config (all 12 lines of it) to a .md file in the /config folder and then removed Piper from the backup until it’s fixed.

After doing that, backups are back to 135Mb.

Pretty sure this is an issue for the Google Drive Backup app to resolve, but it’s not been updated for 3yrs.

2

I noticed this too when checking my daily backup the morning after I updated to Piper 2.5.2. Like you, I just excluded it from my backups.

I use the SFTP Storage integration to backup to a storage server on my local network, so the backup didn’t fail, but it was it was huge! (compared to the day before). After excluding Piper, my backup is back to its normal size.