Just wanted to share my experience backing up and restoring a Home Assistant OS machine, I am new to the HA and have only been using it a week so i certainly don’t know everything but I think my experience may help others so I wanted to share it…
Firstly briefly summary I started out on Hyper-V VM wanted to move to VirtualBox on Linux so I took a full backup to my NAS in HomeAssistant, I hen backed up the VHDX just in case and nuked the machine reinstalling the host on Linux.
I then tried to restore which to call this fustrating would be a little underselling it as you have litterally no feedback or progress indication at all so you just have to keep testing it, which when it fails as it did with me you have no idea how long to wait.
All in all the Backup was under 200Mb, in total is took me 6 hours to Restore and that is not including the OS reinstall or setup etc. just the restore.
To resolve it I did it in stages, which in the end pointed me in the direction of items which failed, this was the proceedure which finally got me up and running…
- New HAOS VM Setup using throw away details
- Add NAS Share in Settings Storage (for access to backup file).
- PARTIAL RESTORE: Home Asssistant Only, Reboot!
- TEST BOOT!
- VM \ DOCKER USERS: If OS boots ok Shut it Down and copy the VHDD File \ Docker Data Directories so you can revert to this point later if need be (get used to this you’ll be doing it a lot, maybe).
- PARTIAL RESTORE: Addons but not all of them limit yourself, I did 4 at a time, if they installed, I Rebooted and did a test before backing up progress again and moving to the next Addon.
- TEST ALL ADDONS LOAD But leave non-cirtical STOPPED!!!
- Backups VHDD \ Data again then Reboot!
- PARTIAL RESTORE: Any other Local Addons \ Media left to Restore!
—Problems I found as a result of this—
- StudioCode Server: Will not restore for me so don’t bother, so easy to just reinstall anyway do it that way skip this!!!
- Unifi Network Application: Again won’t restore, but very easy to restore a Unifi Backup once reinstalled, again skip it and use Unifi’s backups to recover this.
- Meross Local Broker: This actually has a conflicting port with Unifi Network Application, they both try to use 10001! I found if you change Meros Port Unifi AP’s won’t register and complete discovery but if you chnge the unifi discovery port all works well, I am using 10011.
- SamsungSmartThings will need to be relinked again!
Only other problem is not really a problem but the HAOS GUI thinks I am running on HTTP not HTTPS but I use Proxy Manager to forward to localhost:444 for HAOS anyway so I don’t have to use ports at all so whatever.
Hope this is of help to someone, good luck!