Record different entities a certain time

Configuration
1

Hi all,

I’ve a question regarding the the ‘recorder’ integration in the config.yaml file. So my database is getting quite big (5GB) so I started to implement some rules on which entities are important te recorder and which ones are useless to record.

Now my situation: I’ve a smart energy meter (for gas and power) which I’m reading into my Home Assistant. Ofcourse this is important information for me as I can recall my usage and can compare to like last month or year. So it is important to save these entities for maybe 5 years or so?

Most other entities like states of lights etc I would like to keep for a few days, but most definitely not for years.

How can I make a difference in retention days between entities?

Many thanks!

2

I know the word GrafanaInfluxDB, maybe that would suit you?

3

I’m already using Grafana, but that is not a database…

4

InfluxDB is though. And it is better suited to time range data over especially long periods.

Record in home assistant for 7 days, record in InfluxDB forever.

You should definitely still exclude things like sensor.time that update every minute but store no useful historical information.

5

Thanks for the reply!

Currently I’m running HA on a Rpi 4. I have now influx running on the same Pi as HA. I’m reading that the amount of writing for a SD card is bad so I want to store the database externally on my Synology NAS. My NAS can running MariaDB but not Influx as I can not run Docker as it is an older model.

Is there a way in the config.yaml file to give certain entities different retentions?

6

Nope. It’s a global setting.

And yeah Influx on an SD card would not be wise.

7

That is unfortunate, how are other people doing this, running HA on a rpi if I can’t have the database on there?

Might it be possible to connect an external harddrive a put the database on there?