"Bare metal" automated backup | Home Assistant | Page 1

remote fossil May 19, 2025, 2:40 PM

#

Hello everyone, I'm not sure this is the correct place to ask. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

My friend has HA installed on a raspberry pi and he'd like to make a fully automated image backup (alongside the HA way).

I am not an expert in HA so we tried first connecting via SSH but as I discovered later the "extension" one is containerized so can't dd the entire filesystem.

So we tried getting "full" ssh access by creating a file (pardon me, I don't remember correctly as it was some time ago and I only got time to ask now) on the root of the SD card but apparently we couldn't get access to it (as far as I remember when the device came online, the ssh port written in the documentation wasn't replying).

Did anyone of you have done something like this?

My friend wants to keep a rotation of idk 5 full img backups.

Thank you in advance, of course!

#

My original plan was to cron a dd backup via SSH
(forgot to mention this, sorry)

elder breach May 19, 2025, 2:48 PM

#

The OS level SSH access is described here: https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/operating-system/debugging/
We generally recommend to use the backup and restore mechanism or HA itself. Reflash and restore from that in case of failure.
Using dd on a live system is not great data consistency wise.

remote fossil May 19, 2025, 2:57 PM

#

That's the page we followed back then! Basically after putting his ssh key file (without extensions) in the root of the USB device and rebooting it did nothing, the port 22222 was unresponsive.
I don't remember running the ha os import command but I don't think so, probably will be the next thing we try.
He wants to do that as an extra layer of security, I'm sure in case of issues he will try to restore from a backup first, but in the meanwhile he would still like to have a dd image for that 🤔
I will have him try the command as I come back home from work and I'll let you know!

sudden zodiac May 19, 2025, 4:03 PM

#

You shouldn't dd a running system. You'll most likely end up with a corrupted backup

remote fossil May 25, 2025, 4:43 PM

#

sudden zodiac You shouldn't dd a running system. You'll most likely end up with a corrupted ba...

Thanks for the input ofc 🙂

#

Just to update, we managed to get into ssh, weirdly enough the key from puttygen did nothing, I had to recreate it by running ssh-keygen and then converted it to use with WinSCP.

sudden zodiac May 25, 2025, 5:00 PM

#

That's nice but do you understand the consequences of relying on dd of a running machine as a "backup"?

The integrity of the backup is more than questionable

#"Bare metal" automated backup