I’ve been looking at Home Assistant backups and noticed something I’d like to validate with people who actually rely on them.
Home Assistant can create backups, but there doesn’t appear to be a built-in dry-run or pre-restore verification step that checks whether the backup contents are internally consistent before you actually need to restore them.
I built a small experimental prototype that performs static checks without starting Home Assistant or doing a real restore.
So far it can check things such as:
backup/archive structure and metadata
missing configuration include targets
some custom component manifest/domain inconsistencies
It deliberately does NOT claim that a backup is restorable, and it cannot guarantee that a Home Assistant restore will succeed.
The current prototype also does not yet decrypt modern encrypted backups, so I’m not presenting this as a ready-to-use backup validator.
Before I spend more time on it, I’m trying to understand whether this is actually a problem for Home Assistant users.
Have you ever had a backup that existed but failed when you tried to restore it?
Do you currently verify backups somehow before relying on them?
Would you try a pre-restore static verifier like this if encrypted backups were supported?
I’m mainly looking for real experiences and workflow feedback rather than feature requests.
I feel it could be a useful app or whatever as I have tested backups occasionally in the past but I just rely on the fact they are going to work. It would be good to check the backups without the hassle of a full rebuild.
Even better if this could be done with a automation or similar.
That’s a brilliant idea, and I’ll be following it with interest. It’s already handy with a test VM system, but without having to install anything, it’s even better!
I like the idea. But I have to admit I’ve never felt the need for it.
I only take full backups before I change something, like a version update. More regularly, I do incremental backups of the “config” directory. I also keep archival copies of all the config files.
I’ve never seen an incomplete backup. If it contains all the files, and those files were working when the backup was taken, I don’t see much that can go wrong. Corrupt files maybe. Worst case I’d go to the previous backup, and restore any config changes.
Of course this is all predicated on the idea that config settings are stored in .yaml files. As more and more things are moved to .storage, file corruption there becomes a much more critical issue. I can re-create a YAML file. There’s no documentation for anything in .storage, and no way to fix it if one part of one file has an error.