Support external USB drives as backup target in Home Assistant OS

Feature Requests
1

It would be very helpful if Home Assistant OS could automatically detect and support external USB drives as a destination for backups or media storage – directly integrated into the native backup system.

Currently, external drives require manual mounting, shell commands, or third-party add-ons to be usable for backups, which is too technical for many users.

Feature request:

  • Automatic detection and mounting of supported USB drives (NTFS, exFAT, ext4, etc.)
  • Ability to choose an external drive as a backup destination in the UI
  • Option to store backups directly to the USB drive

This would greatly improve usability, make backup storage more flexible, and reduce reliance on internal storage or cloud uploads.

Thanks a lot for the amazing work on Home Assistant!

2

I’m one of the not that technical Linux users and just want to create backups on my usb ssd drive, but so far i spent to many hours to get it to work. As my backups are getting to big for google cloud and HA cloud account i need another solution. I dont understand at all why it is so difficult to mount the drive. HAOS sees the drive but i cant do anything with it. Very frustrating!