Safeguard Your Smart Home: A Guide to Backing Up Home Assistant to the Cloud for Free
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protect your investment in smart home automation with a robust backup strategy. This guide details how to back up your Home Assistant setup to the cloud without incurring additional monthly costs.
You’re probably sick of hearing about how vital backups are, especially for personal devices adn precious files. One thing that can be easy to overlook is your smart home setup, which could take hours of work to restore if something goes wrong. While local backups are all good and well, the more backups you have, the better.Here’s how to set up Home Assistant to back up to the cloud, for free.
Why Bother With Cloud backups?
As long as you’ve enabled the feature under Home Assistant’s settings, you should already be backing up locally. However, local backups aren’t much good if the local machine is the point of failure. If the drive that’s being used to run Home assistant and store your backups suddenly fails, you’re going to have to set up all of your integrations, devices, automations, scenes, and smart home intricacies from cold.
One user learned this lesson firsthand while experimenting with the platform. Running Home Assistant in a VirtualBox virtual machine, they resized the virtual drive and inadvertently wiped the entire installation. “Everything was lost due to being stored within the same virtual machine,” they explained.
While the loss wasn’t catastrophic at that early stage, it highlighted the critical need for offsite backups. A Home Assistant Cloud subscription, costing $6.50 per month, offers remote access, cloud backup, and supports the project financially.However, a more cost-effective solution was readily available: leveraging existing cloud storage. “I realized I already had a ton of cloud storage that costs me money each month, with plenty of space to spare,” the user noted. They decided to utilize their 2TB iCloud budget for this purpose. The following instructions are tailored to Home Assistant running via virtualization on Apple’s operating system, but the fundamentals apply broadly to many setups.
First, Enable Local Backups
The process begins with simply ensuring Home Assistant is creating backups in the first place (in TAR format). This is crucial for easy restoration should the need arise.
To enable backups, navigate to your Home Assistant dashboard (usually homeassistant.local:8123) and log in. Then, click Settings > System > Backups. Enable backups and configure the settings to your liking. A daily backup schedule with retention of three backups is a good starting point.
Under “Configure backup settings”
Automate Cloud Backups with Automator
Now for the automation. Apple’s Automator app provides a simple way to copy the backup files to your cloud storage.Open Automator and create a new “submission.”
Add the “Get Specified Finder Items” action, adding the root “backup” sharepoint.Follow this with the “Copy Finder Items” action, selecting your desired cloud network location (e.g., a “home Assistant” folder in iCloud Drive). Ensure “Replace existing files” is checked.
Save the application and run it, granting access to network shares. To automate daily execution, create a new local calendar event in Apple’s Calendar app for 7 am each day. Under “Alert,” choose “Custom” followed by “Open file” and swap “Calendar” for the Automator application you created.
Never Too Many Backups
These instructions are specific to Home Assistant running on a virtual machine,but the core concept remains the same: expose your backup folder via a network share and automate daily copying to your preferred cloud backup provider. If you’re running Home Assistant directly on “bare metal,” the process can be even simpler by setting your backup location to a directory already shared via a cloud provider. Alternatively, consider using an app like Syncthing for even more redundancy.
Should something go wrong, you’ll have an external backup in the cloud waiting. Even if you never need it, the peace of mind is invaluable.
