I had to hard-reboot my HA Green after an addon build slowed it to a halt.
When it came back, most of my entities were gone and my dashboard was nearly empty.
After hours of studying the damage, I concluded that all of the broken automations, missing entities, etc. came only from Integrations - but not any of the integrations that I had set up in configuration.yaml. Only the ones set up in the UI.
Addons were fine, history was fine, there was no corrupt copy of my database, and the filesystem didn’t seem to be missing any files.
This sucks because the file-configured stuff is declarative and reproducible whereas the UI-configured stuff – I have no idea why those suddenly don’t apply anymore. I didn’t get a notification from HA that anything was wrong.
In this catastrophe I also learned a surprising lesson: HA’s default backup setup provides backups that are virtually useless in such situations. Sure, it was creating a backup every time I upgraded a component. However, all of those backups were “partial” backups, containing nothing but a copy of the sole component being upgraded, and nothing else. Despite the auto backup system, there was no automation of full backups… It looks like full backups must be created manually or with external tools/automations.
So after searching this forum extensively for hints to the issue, in hopes the config is there somewhere if I knew what to fix, I had nothing to fall back on and finally started to re-configure dozens of integrations from scratch. Bummer.
Needless to say, I now use an Auto Backup addon and an Rclone backup sync to my Proton Drive. I think these features really should be in HA core…
You will find everytime you update something in HA it will create a backup. So backups are well covered in HA. It is then up to the user to decide on how to handle that backup. You can use various addons to send these backups to just about wherever you want. My preferred solution is to send a backup to google drive every night.
These HA backups work perfectly if they backed up a working system.
You will find everytime you update something in HA it will create a backup.
That’s what I thought too, but like I said, the auto backups that come with upgrades are only partial backups, scoped to the piece of HA that’s being upgraded. That doesn’t help me when the breakage is larger than some single addons I’ve upgraded in the past months.
It is then up to the user to decide on how to handle that backup. You can use various addons to send these backups to just about wherever you want.
Yes, thank you, I’ll be using Rclone now like I said. However, losing backups has not been a problem, I still have access to over a dozen backups, the issue is that apparently nothing remotely recent is a full backup.
These HA backups work perfectly if they backed up a working system.
My backups backed up a working system, so sure, they work perfectly - for restoring the 5% of my system that they actually cover. I did not change the out-of-box backup configuration, this is just how it is by default.
