Unable to restore despite hundreds of GB of backups

Installation
1

Hi there,

I run Home Assistant for about a year as a VM on an ESXi host. It is set up to backup to a Nas share every day and keep 3 backups in retention. The backup share where this is stored has been exploding in size since this was set up, the last folder alone. called 'Latest is more than 300GB. I tried to understand the folder structure but gave up as each folder contain what seems to be full and partial backups.

Anyway, My Nas had a critical issue with two disk failed, so now I am trying to recover for the last 3 days.

Any attempt to deploy a new instance and upload from the WebUI to restore from backup has ended up in error 504 after a few minutes uploading what i think is the latest full, backup (6.5GB file)

Reading the forums, I see apparently there might be an issue with corrupting the backup if you try to upload backups taken to a Nas share as the web interface does not expect the backup to be compressed (?)

So I tried again, this time adding the samba share as ‘backup’, then as ‘media’ to my new HA instance, hoping it would then find the backups. I can add the share just fine, then the appliance still sees no backup whatsoever and offer to take a new backup.

Today after many different attempts, I have deployed again new instance, enable ssh and sftp, and I am decompressing the ‘full backup’ tar file I tried to upload earlier.

→ Can anybody confirm if I can just drag and drop the contents somewhere on the new HA instance to recover my backup?

Unfortunately I do not have access to the my old VM at all as the Datastore can’t be mounted.

Is there any best practices to backup (as in, is there a way to take backups you can actually restore?) I guess I will need to shut down the VM and export to OVA every week from now on as the backup in HA can’t be trusted. At least this will save a lot of space. I have about half a TB of HA backups just for this HA instance, and so far none of it is useful.

Sorry if this sound negative, but the HA backup thing is definitely completely broken.

2

I don’t use a VM, however, when dealing with large backups you need to copy the backup to the backup folder and restore from there. You do not need to decompress the file.

3

Thanks. I tried that as well, but after 3 or 4 days trying to get anything to work I reinstalled everything from scratch. I found out the backup I did set up has much more options showing up now and only did backup a few individual parts despite it was set as a full backup from day one. I did some further backup and restore tests after reconfiguring eveything. It kind of works even so a lot of preferences are still missing post resotres. For instance any of the network storage configuration is just completely lost every time. Better not trust the HA backup feature and backup the whole VM image level, or offline backup your sd card.