I’ve been experimenting with optimizing my backup routine for Home Assistant, especially since I run it in a virtual machine on my Unraid setup. For a while now, I’ve been using HA’s built-in backup feature to generate daily snapshots, which has been pretty reliable. However, I noticed that backing up the entire 32GB virtual disk felt a bit excessive, especially since the actual data size is much smaller. So, I started exploring backing up just the *.tar files that HA creates. This approach seems more efficient and quicker, but I have a couple of questions:
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If I back up the virtual disk file
/mnt/user/domains/home_assistant/haos_ova-9.5, does it capture my entire configuration? I want to ensure that restoring this file would bring everything back up smoothly without missing any settings or integrations. -
HA doesn’t seem to have a built-in way to manage retention for these *.tar backups. Do I need to set up a separate script on my Unraid box to handle deleting old backups automatically, or is there a more streamlined method within HA itself?
I’ve been using a simple bash script to clean up old backups, but I’m curious if there’s a more integrated solution. I’d love to hear how others are handling their backup strategies, especially in a VM environment. Any tips or best practices would be greatly appreciated!