this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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homeassistant

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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first.
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Soo, someone was backing up their @homeassistant on its own local disk, instead of something outside the VM which runs HA πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ

#homelab fails

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[–] oranki@nord.pub 24 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Pro tip: use symlinks instead of copying files, the backup is near instant!

[–] idunnololz@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago
[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

I prefer reflinks.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 8 points 2 weeks ago

Was it me? I was also doing that until very recently.

[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 5 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks for the reminder, I've subscribed to their cloud service since day 1. Time to actually use that backup feature.

[–] noodle@aus.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

@root @homeassistant It me. I don't see the issue.

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I back mine up to my own local disk, but about once every three months or so, I pull a copy from the disk onto my phone. That way I have another copy of it that's not on the local disk.

My setup doesn't change that much in that amount of time, so I'm not particularly worried about losing a bunch of data.

[–] root@mastodon.raviteja.computer 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@shortwavesurfer This is a good strategy until I remember to do it diligently πŸ˜….

The first step I did with my new install is to ensure that the cloud backup works(self hosted coming soon)

[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 weeks ago

The reason I do it that way is because I have my password manager in KeePass and do the database backups in the same way. So when I'm doing one of them, I do the other at the same time, just for consistency's sake.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 2 points 2 weeks ago

Happened to me as well! Backed up to some local folder in /mnt because the NAS share wasn't mounted properly. Fortunately noticed before anything bad happened.

[–] twinnie@feddit.uk 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I’m not even backing up.

[–] B0rax@feddit.org 10 points 2 weeks ago

Zero chance of backups failing if you don’t have any.

[–] limelight79@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This reminds me, I use the internal ha backup (to a network drive). But I'm using Linux kvm, so I could be doing snapshots instead, which in theory are easier to restore.

[–] root@mastodon.raviteja.computer 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@limelight79 I would still advise doing an alternate method(along with snapshot) of copy i.e tarred config directory as done by HA. I am not sure what happened(error message indicated disk corruption)but I couldn’t recover from the vm snapshots I had.

[–] limelight79@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Do both, you're saying? Maybe keep the daily backup and then do a weekly snapshot, something like that.

@limelight79 I am saying two different methods of backup i.e one at file system level.. which the home assistant provides (to a cloud or local object storage) and one at block level (which I think where the snapshots you were referring to come into play)

[–] GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 1 points 2 weeks ago

I like to dump the whole VM every so often.
Overkill? Maybe. But I like knowing that no matter how hard I cock it up, I can spin an old version up.