This entity does not have a unique ID. But where is it?

Yes, this old chestnut. Which I thought I had worked out.
However…

I have several entities that seem to appear nowhere in my config. Not even in my .storage files.

Where do these entities come from (they all end with close_match)?

How do I get rid of them?
I temporarily removed .storage from my exclude list, before anyone asks

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Just for clarity, I did manually create these entities today but forgot to include a unique ID (why this is incumbent on me I still don’t understand but that is for another day). I spent a long time trying to remove them but in the end gave up and got so frustrated that I restored last nights backup.

Why won’t these zombie entities won’t go away?!

You could try this.

Ev. restart HA after that.

Also try clearing the cache in your bowser (refresh from source).

If these are mqtt devices you need to delete the retained discovery messages in your mqtt broker.

Ok, three quick answers. Thanks.
I had an interesting outcome, so taking each in turn…

TL:DR The most unlikely answer was the right one. Which does raise a question for me at least as to why the issue existed in the first place?

I had high hopes for this when I read it. But then I realised, how would recorder still have my entities after restoring a backup? I tried just in case (even the most unlikely suggestions are worth a try, see below) but it wasn’t the answer.

I thought you might be a bit mad suggesting this. Surely the ‘Settings, Entities’ page is dynamic enough not to need to clear the cache? But… drum roll… I did it and they have gone (although it seems they weren’t actually there in the first place :grinning: )

I have no idea how or why this worked and I’m a bit annoyed now that I probably didn’t need to restore from a backup.

Finally

On the face of it this felt like the most likely solution. They were MQTT but they never actually had any retained messages because I realised that the idea I was trying to implement was never going to work anyway, hence I removed the entities before MQTT knew anything about them

I might be a bit mad anyway…. :crazy_face: