Why the need to still use an automation to schedule the creation of backups and, more annoyingly, the need for a community integration to clean them up?
Surely this functionality should be more native by now and selectable in the GUI
Native or automation isn’t the only two options, it’s use cases like this where blueprints shine. Someone did all the automation work so now it’s just configuring a few options.
The clean up part is a bit annoying though. You don’t technically need another integration, you could make a command line notify that removes a backup and call it from an automation. But that’s tricky and those can’t be put in blueprints right now unfortunately.
I use Home Assistant Google Drive Backup - which is in the add-on store.
It is highlight customisable and before you panic can have the “Google” portion disabled and only back up locally.
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Tbh I think this is the other reason there is not native backup scheduler. This addon is quite good, as is the next cloud one (and I think there’s a samba one too?) Many people use them so between those and the blueprint the needs are kind of covered. The community already filled this gap.
Native NAS mapping should accompany this, cause really your backup should be on a different disk, especially if using a pi.
OP here, just to point out that personally I have a robust solution in place using ESXi VM backups and a remote SMB share for HA backups themselves but isn’t the point of WTH to highlight areas of weakness in the software?
The only slight niggle I have is when using the ’ Clean up snapshots’ community integration to cleanup and leave the latest 5 backups. If I’ve had a number of addons automatically update themselves, which creates addon backups, the integration will delete older full HA backups which could potentially lead to a scenario where I’m left with only addon backups and no full HA ones. As I mentioned above though, I do have full VM backups available in an emergency but internal HA backups are much faster to restore particularly from a SSD disk.
I would of thought that remote backups and scheduling could be baked into HassOS at least.
It’s a tradeoff. Everything baked into HA has to be maintained and supported indefinitely by the HA team. And changes to it are subject to HAs release and review processes which has pros and cons.
If it’s easy for the community to close a particular gap with a blueprint and there’s interest in doing so (like with this one) then the HA team may be better served by making it easier to make and discover blueprints then building it themselves.
When I go to /hassio/backups, I can see the existing backups and even delete or restore them.
But I cannot for the life of me find how to change the backup schedules. It seems like each addon has its own schedule of backups (perhaps associated with updates), but there’s no way to configure this, it seems. I didn’t even know these backups were being made until I almost ran out of space. 
Is there a way to say “please don’t backup this addon”, for instance?
But I cannot for the life of me find how to change the backup schedules. It seems like each addon has its own schedule of backups (perhaps associated with updates), but there’s no way to configure this, it seems. I didn’t even know these backups were being made until I almost ran out of space
These are created when one of your addons auto-updates. AFAIK there’s no way to configure this other than to turn off auto-updates, manually update your addons and choose no backup when you come to do so. This highlights my point about how lacking in configurability the backup process is.
I clean up my backups, including those from addons by using the community integration GitHub - tmonck/clean_up_snapshots: Service to clean up your home assistant snapshots, so you don’t manually have to.
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I am new here, started using HA yesterday.
I have downloaded my “full backup” of the Home, which is currently safely stored on iCloud.
• Why would I want frequent backups taken?
• Why would an addon auto-updating warrant a backup?
As long as my smart devices are unchanged (no new hardware), and I do not setup any more automation, my backup can be restored with nothing lost—right?
There are automatic backups with updates. If for some reason your update breaks functionality, you want it to be easy to revert. The backup also stores data(if applicable) so it is more complete than installing an older version over the faulty new one.
If you don’t change anything in your devices or automations, and you don’t care about historical data, there is not much need to do frequent backups.