3…2…1… Backup – Residence Assistant
Residence Assistant is a strong instrument that may prevent money and time by automating your private home. Fairly necessary issues across the house, from heating to an computerized fish feeder, must rely on it. Nevertheless, as your setup grows extra complicated, sustaining it—what we name “digital housekeeping”—can change into a time-consuming process. Backups are a important a part of this upkeep, but they’re typically ignored, particularly by new customers, typically till it’s too late when catastrophe strikes.
To make backups easy, we’ve launched new automated and off-site backup options within the newest launch of Residence Assistant. These enhancements will make it simpler than ever to safeguard your setup. As we step into the New Yr, we’d encourage you to undertake a easy but essential decision: often again up your information. With our new instruments, it takes simply 5 minutes to arrange and supplies lasting peace of thoughts.
Be taught extra about our backups beneath, or get began now by updating and visiting the backups web page.
What’s in a backup?
Backups are essential for a reliable smart home. They protect your system from hardware failures, natural disasters, and cyberattacks, allowing you to quickly restore operations. A solid backup strategy follows the 3-2-1 rule:
- 3 copies of your data
- 2 stored on different media
- 1 kept off-site
While this may seem excessive, consider a scenario like a lightning strike: both your Home Assistant system and any local storage, like network-attached storage (NAS), could be destroyed. That’s why an off-site backup is non-negotiable for true resilience, and a comprehensive backup strategy should include:
- Regular and frequent backups of critical data
- Following the 3-2-1 rule for redundancy
- Encrypting backups to protect against theft and corruption
- Testing backups to ensure they are functional
- Defining how long backups should be retained
To support these best practices, we have worked hard to introduce Automatic Backups and seamless integration with off-site backup location providers, such as Home Assistant Cloud. These updates, part of our 2024 roadmap, make it easier than ever to provide peace of mind to our users, by implementing a robust backup strategy, and keep your smart home running smoothly.
Backups have never been this easy
Home Assistant backups are incredibly good, backing up every setting and add-on, making restores feel a bit like magic. It even works across different CPU architectures! Up until recently setting up a 3-2-1 backup strategy in Home Assistant was not entirely straightforward. This changes with Home Assistant 2025.1, where we’re elevating our backup experience with three new important features.
- Automatic encrypted backups – You can now schedule automatic backups every night or once a week, ensuring you always have a recent backup at hand.
- Automatic cleanup – No longer worry about backups overrunning your disk space, as you can now set the maximum number of backups that should be stored.
- Backup locations – We have added a new system for integrations to provide backup locations (also known as backup agents), permitting you to sync backups to each native or off-site storage. It’s launching with assist for network shares and Home Assistant Cloud (included at no further value to subscribers), with extra places to comply with.
Get began with our Backup Wizard
The brand new computerized backup function in Residence Assistant 2025.1 comes with a brand new simple to make use of backup wizard. With a few clicks, you possibly can backup your Residence Assistant system on a daily schedule and simply select the locations the place backups are saved. New customers shall be prompted with a wizard to ensure they arrange computerized encrypted backups. Choosing the advisable settings ensures {that a} backup is made each night time, that three backups are stored, and that they’re uploaded to all obtainable places.
Backup places
At launch, only a few backup locations will be available, but we’ve made it easy for developers to integrate more, so expect a lot of options to follow. As part of this renewed focus on smart home resilience set out in our roadmap, cloud backup has been added to Home Assistant Cloud, which will be available day one to all subscribers for no additional cost. It will only store the latest backup, which must be under 5GB (you’ll be notified to repair it if it is too large to upload). If you lose your other backups, you can always go to your Cloud account page
New Residence Assistant options like this supercharged backup functionality is just attainable with funding from our Residence Assistant Cloud subscribers. Including backup to the subscription at no further value, was the least we might do to thank them for his or her continued assist.
Safe by default
Backups include all Residence Assistant information, together with all of the keys to each built-in gadget in your sensible house and the historical past of how you reside your life. This information is essential to maintain safe. With computerized backups and the 3-2-1 strategy we’re selling to customers to retailer their backups off-site. Because of this all computerized backups are totally encrypted.
When a consumer configures computerized backups, they are going to be offered with the encryption key and the choice to obtain an emergency equipment. The emergency equipment accommodates all of the necessary info, together with a hyperlink to the instructions on how to use it to restore a backup. If you were to ever delete your emergency kit, it is available to re-download in the backup configuration page.
Apply 3-2-1 to your backups
Take a look at the above video tutorial or learn our docs to be taught extra about establishing computerized and off-site backups.
Conclusion
Too typically, folks simply beginning their sensible house journey transfer ahead a little bit too quick and make a mistake that causes some downtime. This impacts the family’s confidence, as one thing that must be making their lives simpler is definitely seen as unreliable. Keep away from this early pitfall and construct a resilient sensible house with 3-2-1 backups.
