Restore over current HA?

When I woke up this morning my HA was going bonkers, lights not working displays showing entities not available.

It appears my ESPHome devices got removed, and a few integrations disappeared. I’ve spent the morning manually adding and fixing but some of my autmations are looking for specific device ids, and it’s going to be a mission to find the new ids one by one.

I’ve got recent backups, so I thought I’d try a restore, but I can’t find a guide to help me restore over 'n current HA instance, the guides are mostly for new installations. Is it possible to restore over an existing HA instance?

Out of interest, this is the error I could find in the log where all the trouble began:

2025-02-28 06:05:22.508 ERROR (SyncWorker_0) [homeassistant.util.json] Could not parse JSON content: /config/.storage/core.config_entries
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/util/json.py", line 73, in load_json
    return orjson.loads(fdesc.read())  # type: ignore[no-any-return]
           ~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
orjson.JSONDecodeError: unexpected character: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I’m running a pi 4 with sdcard.

Thinking of using my pi 5 with m2 drive if I can’t restore in place.

Firstly your issues were probably caused by a faulty SD card. I would not risk restoring to that card if it was my choice.

Secondly a fresh install and restore will be easier and quicker in the long run, as the restore does not restore the OS just the configuration so if you have a fault in the OS you may not get far.

Thirdly if you have the m2 drive available use that either on the pi4 or 5.

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Just wanted to say installing a fresh HA on pi5 + nvme and then restore worked like magic.

Restore from the HA setup page did not work for some reason though.