I’m having problems recovering my instance from a back up file. Looking Online it appears, I’m not the only one with this issue which is quite suprising as you’d think this would be a fundamental requirement for Home Assistant?
Anyway, my situation is as follows; I am trying to create a ‘plug & play’ back up SD Card that I can use should my primary SD Card fail. Or (as has happened to me several times before) if my system dies following a system update.
I already have automatic backups sent to my Google Drive. So have the TAR files I need.
With the new SD card, I flash it using Balena Etcher and load the onboarding screen. I have tried using the ‘restore from back up file’ option from the onboarding page. But nothing seems to happen. I select the Tar File I want and it either sends me back to the onboarding page, or disconnects and the instance of HA is unreachable.
I’ve also tried the route of creating a new install of HA then installing the Samba Share Add On and dropping in the Tar File to the ‘Back Up’ folder. Then I restore from the back up page within HS. All looks to be going fine until HS is disconnected and becoming unreachable.
Has anyone else experienced this issue before? Is there a way around it?
I can’t share any log data with you, because I have no access to HA via the card with the issue. Looking at my Primary SD Card, there are no errors in the log to suggest why restoring a version of it wouldn’t work.
When you hit restore from the gui it does indeed seem to just drop you back to the main screen with no confirmation that something is/will happen. That is a flaw that is hopefully addressed.
In saying that it usually does start a restore, it takes a long time to actually restore. Longer than you would imagine. The disconnect is normal I’d say. Wait abit longer… Like an hour.
I have HA supervised set up on a pi4 using buster OS and docker/portainer externally to HA. You can watch the containers being rebuilt from portainer. It just takes longer than you might think. The disconnect is the HA container stopping to restore.
I’ve also tried the route of creating a new install of HA then installing the Samba Share Add On and dropping in the Tar File to the ‘Back Up’ folder. Then I restore from the back up page within HS.
This is the method I use as restoring from the GUI during install always fails with larger backups.
Restoring using Samba works for me but as @HasQT said it does take a while. Go have a coffee and come back and see if fine.
I left it for a couple of hours (I can’t leave it too long as my central heating system relies on HA being available and the good Wife isn’t best pleased when she can’t put the heating on )
Anyway, you’ll have to believe me that I have tried this before to no avail. But since your posts, I have tried again, and its up and running on the back up!!! I’ve even updated to the latest version 12.10 and so far so good.
I am going to look into ‘Docker’. I’ve read posts from quite a lot of people who seem to use this…something else to get my head around
HAOS is just a slightly more controlled OS/docker setup compared to how I have mine setup. If you are running happily on HAOS I wouldn’t bother changing. I have it setup to run an “addon” outside of HA, that I have since brought into HA. HAOS looks after the OS updates for you.
I was only describing it to illustrate the restore process. There is probably a log viewer(which would be handy if was an auto redirect on a restore) you can watch to achieve a similar result. Or just wait as you did.
)