At some point, you will find yourself needing a backup of your Home Assistant files. A single update gone wrong or a corrupted SD card can leave you rebuilding your entire smart home from scratch. If you are just getting started with Home Assistant, the first thing you should do is to set up your automatic backup process. By enabling automatic backups, you can rest easy knowing you’ll always have a restore point. I literally just restored from a backup today, so I am particularly thankful I had a backup available from early this morning.
Why You Need Automatic Backups
- Protect Against Updates – Sometimes, new releases or integrations break things. Backups let you roll back in minutes.
- Hardware Failures – SD cards and drives eventually fail. A backup ensures you don’t lose months of work.
- Peace of Mind – Automations, integrations, and dashboards can take hours to recreate. Backups save you from starting over.
Setting Up Backups
Automating the backup process used to take a few extra steps, as you needed to install a popular third party integration in order to backup files to Google Drive. Home Assistant has now made this even easier, allowing you to set this up within the app. Backups can include your configuration, add-ons, and database.
To get started, you can follow these steps from Home Assistant on automating backups.