Home Assistant Backup Guide: Never Lose Your Config Again

Why Backups Are Non-Negotiable

You've spent dozens of hours configuring Home Assistant. The automations, the dashboards, the integrations with 30+ devices — all of it lives in a handful of files on your Home Assistant host. A corrupted SD card, a botched update, or a failed migration can wipe everything in seconds.

This isn't a hypothetical. SD card corruption is one of the most common failure modes for Raspberry Pi-based Home Assistant installations. Even on more reliable hardware like an SSD-equipped NUC or the Home Assistant Green, unexpected power loss during a write can corrupt your configuration. A solid backup strategy is the single most important thing you can do to protect your smart home.

The good news: Home Assistant has excellent built-in backup tools, and with a few minutes of setup, you can have fully automated, off-site backups running continuously without lifting a finger.

What HA Backs Up

A full Home Assistant backup includes:

• Configuration files — your configuration.yaml, automations, scripts, scenes, and all YAML files
• Add-on data — the data directories for every installed add-on (including Zigbee2MQTT databases, ESPHome configs, etc.)
• Home Assistant database — your history, logbook, and statistics
• SSL certificates — if you've set up external access
• Media files — optionally included
• Core settings — your network configuration, user accounts, and integrations

Partial backups let you select specific add-ons or configuration folders, which is useful for more frequent lightweight backups when a full backup would be too large.

Built-In Backup System

Home Assistant OS (HAOS) includes a backup system accessible from Settings → System → Backups. Creating a manual backup is as simple as clicking "Create Backup." The backup is stored as a .tar file in the /backup directory on your HA host.

You can download any backup directly from the UI by clicking the three-dot menu next to it and selecting "Download." This gives you a local copy on your computer, which is a great first line of defense — but relying on manual downloads is error-prone. You need automation.

Automating Your Backups

The easiest way to automate backups in Home Assistant is using the Auto Backup add-on (by Jambour), available in HACS. It runs on a schedule and can automatically delete old backups to save space.

Setting Up Auto Backup

1. Install HACS if you haven't already
2. Search for "Auto Backup" in HACS and install it
3. In the add-on configuration, set your desired schedule (e.g., daily at 3 AM)
4. Set the number of backups to keep (7 is a good default)
5. Enable "Include Add-ons" for a full backup

Alternatively, you can use a native HA automation with the hassio.backup_full or hassio.backup_partial service calls. This requires no add-ons and works reliably:

alias: Daily Backup
trigger:
  - platform: time
    at: "03:00:00"
action:
  - service: hassio.backup_full
    data:
      name: "Auto_{{ now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d') }}"

Cloud Storage Options

Keeping backups only on your local HA host is asking for trouble. There are several ways to automatically push backups to the cloud.

Google Drive (via Samba + rclone)

The most popular approach is using the Samba Backup add-on combined with a NAS, or using rclone to sync the /backup folder to Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other cloud provider. The rclone approach requires SSH access but is extremely flexible.

Nabu Casa Cloud Backup

If you're a Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) subscriber, automatic cloud backups are built in as of HA 2024.6. Simply go to Settings → System → Backups and enable "Cloud Backup." Your backups sync automatically to Nabu Casa's encrypted servers. This is by far the easiest option and costs $6.50/month (which also unlocks remote access and voice assistant integration).

Dropbox / OneDrive Add-ons

Search the add-on store for "Dropbox Sync" or use community add-ons for OneDrive. These run on a schedule and push new backups to your cloud storage automatically.

Backing Up to a NAS

If you have a Synology, QNAP, or TrueNAS device on your network, backing up to it is fast, cheap, and keeps everything local. The Samba Backup add-on makes this straightforward.

1. Install the "Samba Backup" add-on from the official HA add-on store
2. Configure it with your NAS IP, share name, username, and password
3. Set your backup schedule and retention policy
4. Optionally enable password protection for the backup files

Backups will be copied from HA to your NAS automatically. For full offsite protection, configure your NAS to also sync to a cloud service like Backblaze B2 or Amazon S3.

How to Restore a Backup

Restoring from a backup is straightforward if you know the steps. The exact process depends on your situation:

Restoring on the Same Hardware

1. Go to Settings → System → Backups
2. Select the backup you want to restore
3. Click "Restore" and choose full or partial restore
4. Confirm and wait — HA will restart after restoring

Restoring to New Hardware

1. Flash a fresh HAOS image to your new device
2. On first boot, choose "Restore from backup" instead of starting fresh
3. Upload your backup .tar file
4. Wait for the restore to complete — all your config, add-ons, and integrations will be back

Best Practices

• 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite
• Daily automated backups with 7-day retention
• Before every update: Create a manual backup before hitting that "Update" button
• Test restores annually to verify your backups actually work
• Use partial backups for frequent lightweight snapshots between full backups
• Store backups encrypted — your HA config contains API keys, passwords, and tokens
• Monitor backup age — create a HA sensor that alerts you if no backup has been created in 48 hours

Hardware Recommendation: Start Right

If you're still running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi with an SD card, you're on borrowed time. SD cards are not designed for the constant read/write load that HA databases generate. Upgrading to dedicated hardware is the single best reliability improvement you can make.

The Home Assistant Green is the official plug-and-play Home Assistant appliance. It uses an internal eMMC storage that's far more reliable than SD cards, runs cool and silent, and requires zero configuration to get up and running. Pair it with the strategies in this guide and your HA installation will be bulletproof.