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Home Assistant Quickie: Backup to Google Drive

Backup is also essential for the smart home. Even more important is having a backup in an independent location. With the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup, this is quick, easy and secure.

Home-Assistant-Quickie
Home Assistant Quickie: Backup to Google Drive

What good is the best backup if it’s stored on the same hardware as the application itself? A lightning strike, overvoltage or simply a hardware defect can not only destroy the actual application, but the backup along with it if it was connected as an external hard drive, for example.

A secure backup includes several generations of a backup in a physically different location. Theft, flooding, fire - all these are things you never want to experience. If the backup is also destroyed in the process, you have no chance at all of restoring the original system. This of course applies not only to Home Assistant, but also when it comes to important documents, photos or passwords.

With the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on, you can automatically transfer all settings and data to Google Drive and restore them if needed.

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You can create individual schedules, automatically delete old backups according to definable retention periods, and much more. A Home Assistant installation can be completely restored from the backups.

Go to Settings -> Add-ons -> Add-on Store. Now open the menu with the 3 dots at the top right and select “Repositories”. Here you create a new repository https://github.com/sabeechen/hassio-google-drive-backup . After you’ve reloaded the page, you should find this extension under Add-ons, which you can install with a click.

In the add-on settings, you can now authorize your Google Drive and make the desired settings for backup frequency, time, retention, etc.

With a free Google account, you get 15 GB of cloud storage, which should be sufficient even for more extensive installations. Another 100 GB is available for an affordable 1.99 € per month.

The add-on also comes with its own entities, with which you can, for example, monitor whether the backup is working. I created a card in Lovelace that is only displayed when the backup hasn’t worked:

yaml 
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type: conditional
conditions:
  - entity: binary_sensor.backups_stale
    state_not: 'off'
card:
  type: markdown
  content: >-
    Backups are not working, please check the "Home Assistant Google Drive Backup"
    add-on for details!
  title: Backups not working!`

Of course, you can also use this to create notifications via the Home Assistant app, email or Alexa voice output.

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