What HA Backup contains

Hello,

I have a stupid question but i cannot find a clever answer to it. The question is very simple: What is included in the Home Assistant backup (full). Please, do not redirect me to unzip a backup and check the folders i have already done that. I am more interested into getting an answer in layman’s terms such as:

Profile information, settings, devices, entities, integrations, automations, scenes, helpers etc.

One of the most important aspects of this question is, does it back up zigbee devices? I know that there is a backup method via the ZHA integration but i don’t think it backs up the devices but rather the ratio. Opening the backup created from ZHA, there is no reference to devices whatsoever.

Thank you very much
Kind Regards
M

The full HA backup contains every configuration file about your HA install, which if you’re using ZHA includes the ZHA backups. If you’re using Home Assistant OS (or Supervised) it’ll also include all the add-on configuration.

It doesn’t include any of the Docker or add-on images, or other software.

3 Likes

Hi Tinkerer,

Thanks very much for your answer. One more question please. Before the latest releases of HA, we were creating groups manually in the groups.yaml file inside the config directory. Now, we have a helper called group but i don’t see the groups created via this helper in the groups.yaml file.

Are the groups being backed up as well?

I would assume that any further settings from 3rd party integrations are not part of the backup correct?

I am using supervised HA.

Thanks

That was two questions, but yes both UI created groups and third party integrations are backed up.

1 Like

Anything you set up in the HA UI is included, as is anything you do with the YAML in the configuration folder, or anything else there.

The UI (other than the automation, script, and scene editors) doesn’t touch YAML, which is why you’ll never see those files change when you set up a helper, add a user, etc.

Settings for any third party integration are also backed up, as are the custom components themselves since they’re all held in your config folder.

2 Likes

If I can add a follow-on question, does the full backup include add-on’s and their configuration like Node Red, and HACS repos?

Yes.

I have just tried, I am running the following in a VM, I just imported a new .OVA, file, spun it up, and tried a restore, no luck :frowning: do I need to follow a certain procedure?

Home Assistant 2023.6.2
Supervisor 2023.06.2
Operating System 10.2

Home Assistant creates .tar backup files. And they can not be “spun up”. You have to restore them on a clean install.

Look inside your backup with a file compression application like 7zip or similar you will see what is saved there.

sorry, yes, I Installed a clean VM from an OVA, then I tried to restore from the .tar file, tried again, no luck…do i just need to wait longer for the restore?

Maybe. There’s little progress information from what I can remember.

I have just found your guide How to restore a backup

but I never seem to get to the following image, Connection lost. Reconnecting…

image

100% guess:
You had SSL configured before (which is included in your backup)
The webpage you are using to restore is HTTP (non-SSL), so when it completes, that webpage refuse to answer to non-SSL request as the restored config are using SSL.

If this is the case, change the URL from http:// to https://

no SSL configured, but I do use Nabu Casa, however I currently do an entire VM back up ~20G or so to another NAS and then cloud; just exploring a smaller backup solution :slight_smile:

Then it’s time to check your ha su logs (in a separate topic as what you are dealing with is unrelated to this one.)

1 Like

For what it’s worth, I have fully restored from backup on new VM in the past. In fact, what I did is to install HA on VM and then take a snapshot of the fresh installation.

When I needed to restore, I restored the snapshot first, updated to the latest HA version and then restored from backup.

It might take some time to restore just leave it there. At the end it will restart and everything will come back including add-ons and their data. You will then need to update the add-ons themselves and anything you have from hacs in case there are newer versions available.

Perhaps an idea for development is some kind of progress bar for the restore so the user knows that it’s being progressing…

Where are the config file, the automations files and stuff like that in the backup exactly? I want to reinstall but copy some code from the other installation and just paste it in.