What happens to automations that run at a specific time of day if HA is offline?

[Rofo (Ro)]

I’m assuming that because of this thread:

Re-run time-based automation if HA is down the first time

I have an automation which runs daily at 1 AM to save a value to a file. If for some reason (power failure, HA crashes, etc.) it doesn’t run, I’d like to run it again later in the day. It doesn’t really matter what time it runs, because it’s storing a “yesterday” value. But it has to run at some point each day or yesterday’s data will be gone. And it can only run once each day or the data in the file will be duplicated. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

The answer is it doesn’t run. This makes sense because in theory, HA could be offline for minutes, hours, days or longer.

Is this still correct ?

[tom_l]

@Rofo

The answer is it doesn’t run.

Correct.

[IanBJ (Ian Jones)]

As Tom says, it won’t run.

But you could add a HA Start trigger to any relevant automations plus apropriate condition checks then run your actions.

automation:
  trigger:
    - platform: homeassistant
      event: start

I’ve used this in automations to cater for (light duration) Timmers that could Finish whilst HA is down, and other situations. In this case, the timer Finish not firing could leave (lights etc.) on too long.
Sometimes it may be worth triggering a short while after HA Startup to ensure that all is settled down and/or also to avoid a sudden loading.