Back Up Home Assistant So Moving Never Wipes Your Setup

Think about what your smart home actually is. Not the plugs and sensors scattered around the flat — you can box those up in twenty minutes. The real thing you’ve built lives in software: the automations that cut the lights when you leave, the dashboard you rearranged three times before it felt right, the Zigbee network you spent an evening getting stable. All of that is configuration. And configuration can be saved in a single file.

Move without that file, or lose it to a failing SD card, and you’re not just moving house. You’re rebuilding from scratch in an empty flat, at the worst possible time.

For renters, the stakes are especially clear. The whole appeal of a no-drill smart home — the thing that makes renter-friendly gear worth the effort — is that it comes with you. But “unplug and take it” only works if the configuration travels too. Backups are what close that gap.

Honest note: The steps here are drawn from Home Assistant’s official documentation and widely tested community practices, as well as published details from the 2026.4 release cycle. I describe flows I’ve researched carefully; I won’t claim to have personally run every restore scenario on every piece of hardware. Treat specific UI labels as correct as of mid-2026 — minor wording can shift between releases.

What a Home Assistant backup actually contains

When you create a full backup in Home Assistant, the resulting .tar file bundles everything that makes your instance yours:

• Your entire configuration — configuration.yaml, all related files, and any custom components
• Automations, scripts, and scenes — the logic you’ve written or generated, all of it
• Add-on data — the internal data stores used by add-ons like Zigbee2MQTT, Matter Server, or ESPHome
• Installed integrations and their settings — so your cloud accounts and API keys come back with you
• Dashboards — Lovelace views, card layouts, the arrangement you spent a weekend on
• Media stored on the instance — optional; you can exclude this to keep file size manageable

Restore a full backup onto new hardware and Home Assistant reappears looking exactly as it did: same room names, same automations, same login. The only things that typically need attention are physical radio devices — your Zigbee coordinator pairing in particular — which is covered below.

One important detail for 2026: since Home Assistant 2026.4, all backups are encrypted using Argon2id key derivation with XChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption. That’s a meaningful upgrade — the file sitting in your cloud storage is cryptographically protected even if the bucket isn’t locked down. The trade-off is that your encryption passphrase (your backup emergency kit key) is now non-negotiable. You cannot restore without it, so treat it like a password to your bank: store it in a password manager, not a sticky note.

Not yet running Home Assistant? The setup guide covers the first install, and the hub selector helps you pick the right hardware before you start.

Step 1: Create a backup right now

Go to Settings → System → Backups and hit Create backup. Choose Full backup. Home Assistant will spend a minute compressing everything into a timestamped .tar file and add it to the backup list.

That’s the whole step. You’ve captured your smart home in one file.

Do this before anything consequential: before an update, before adding a new integration, before you start packing boxes. A backup you made twenty minutes before something went wrong is infinitely better than the one you planned to make next week.

Step 2: Schedule automatic backups so you stop having to remember

A backup you made in March isn’t much comfort when you’re moving in July. Go back to Settings → System → Backups and open Automatic backups. Home Assistant’s onboarding wizard (as of 2025.1) actually prompts new users to set this up immediately — the recommended defaults create a nightly backup and keep three rolling copies.

If you’re adjusting an existing install, the settings are:

• Schedule: weekly is fine for a stable setup; daily if you’re actively building or tweaking automations
• Retention: three to five copies gives you a window to catch a bad change without hoarding storage
• Recorder database: this is your sensor history and statistics; excluding it keeps backups to 50–300 MB instead of multiple gigabytes. For most renters, the history is nice-to-have — the configuration is what actually matters

No add-on is needed for the schedule itself. It’s built in since 2024.8. Set it once, verify it ran once, and you’re done.

Step 3: Get a copy off the device — the step everyone skips

Here is where most people’s backup strategy has a fatal flaw: the backup is sitting on the same SD card as the thing it’s supposed to protect. If that card dies — and SD cards in Raspberry Pi hubs fail regularly — the backup goes with it.

You need at least one copy somewhere else. The practical options:

Google Drive Backup add-on Search for “Google Drive Backup” (by sabeechen) in the Add-on Store. Once configured, it pushes every backup to your Google Drive on a schedule. Setup takes about ten minutes. After that it runs quietly in the background and you never have to think about it. If you’re on Home Assistant Cloud, off-site upload is built into the backup settings directly.

Manual download before a move In Settings → System → Backups, open the three-dot menu on any backup and choose Download. This pulls the .tar to your laptop. It’s slow and manual, but it’s the right belt-and-suspenders move the night before you start packing.

NAS or network drive If you already have a NAS on your home network, the Samba or network storage add-on can push backups there automatically. Excellent if you have the setup; unnecessary if you don’t.

The rule: a backup that only exists on the device is not a backup. Pick one off-device destination. Confirm it’s actually receiving files. Move on.

Step 4: Back up your Zigbee coordinator separately

This is the subtlety that trips people up, because the main HA backup doesn’t handle it. If you’re running Zigbee devices — which most renters with stick-on sensors and smart plugs are — your device pairings live in the coordinator’s firmware, not in the Home Assistant config file.

• Zigbee2MQTT: Go to the add-on’s settings and export a coordinator backup. Keep this file alongside your HA backup.
• ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation): Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Zigbee Home Automation → Configure → Backup to export.

Miss this step and your Zigbee devices will need to be re-paired from scratch in the new flat. With five sensors that’s annoying; with twenty it’s a whole evening. Take the five minutes now.

Thread/Matter devices handle re-pairing more gracefully through the Matter ecosystem, but it’s still worth noting what you have before you start unplugging things.

Step 5: Write down the things no backup captures

Five minutes before moving day, make a quick note of:

• Your encryption passphrase / emergency kit key (if you haven’t saved it in a password manager already)
• The USB dongles plugged into the hub — label them with tape, because they look identical
• Any static IP or hostname you’ve set for the HA instance
• Add-on credentials that were pasted into config fields manually (these don’t always survive a restore cleanly)

Keep this note in your password manager or a locked note in your phone. It’s not a long list, but it’s exactly what you’ll want at 9 pm in a new flat surrounded by boxes.

Restoring on new hardware: the move-day workflow

Whether you’re re-flashing the same SD card, upgrading to a Home Assistant Green, or replacing a dead Raspberry Pi with a new one, the restore path is the same:

1. Flash a fresh Home Assistant OS image onto the new device
2. On first boot, the onboarding wizard asks if you want to restore from a backup — say yes
3. Upload your .tar file from your laptop, or point it at your Google Drive backup location
4. Enter your encryption passphrase
5. Home Assistant restores everything: config, add-ons, integrations, dashboards
6. After the reboot, re-import your Zigbee coordinator backup and let devices rejoin

On matching hardware, this is genuinely seamless. Switching to a different device type (say, Pi 4 to Home Assistant Green) is well-documented and works cleanly — configuration, automations and integrations all transfer. The only things that may need a small tweak are add-ons with hardware-specific USB passthrough configs.

Expect an hour or two total for the restore, Zigbee re-pairing, and a quick check that your five core automations are firing correctly.

The SD card reality

SD cards and Home Assistant have a complicated relationship. The constant small writes that HA does — logging sensor states, updating the recorder database, writing config changes — are genuinely hard on SD cards over time. Failure isn’t a question of if; it’s a question of when.

The solution that serious HA users land on eventually: boot from an SSD instead of an SD card. It’s more durable, faster, and eliminates the most common single point of failure. The hub selector can help you find hardware that supports SSD booting natively — the Home Assistant Green and certain Raspberry Pi setups both support it.

But even with an SSD, backups matter. Hardware fails, firmware goes wrong, upgrades have bad days. Off-device backups are the last line that nothing else covers.

Frequently asked questions

Does a full backup include everything I need to restore completely? Almost everything. Configuration, automations, dashboards, add-on data, integrations — yes. Your Zigbee radio pairings and any credentials you pasted directly into add-on config fields — those need the separate handling described above. For the vast majority of a typical renter’s setup, the full backup is sufficient.

What if I lose my encryption passphrase? As of 2026.4, there is no recovery path without the passphrase. The encryption is intentionally strong. Home Assistant generates an emergency kit when you first set up backups — a PDF with the key — and prompts you to download it. If you’ve lost it and still have access to the running instance, go to Settings → System → Backups → Backup settings and regenerate the key, then download a fresh emergency kit. Do this now, not after something goes wrong.

How large is a typical backup? Without the recorder database, a full backup for a modest renter setup tends to be 50–300 MB. Including the database can push it to several gigabytes. For a move, a database-free backup is usually the right call — you need the configuration, not the sensor history.

Can I restore onto different hardware than I backed up from? Yes, with minor caveats. Home Assistant OS backups are designed to be portable across supported hardware. Restoring from a Raspberry Pi 4 to a Home Assistant Green is a documented and well-tested path. Some USB passthrough configuration may need adjustment, but everything else — configuration, automations, integrations, dashboards — comes through intact.

Bottom line

Your smart home is really just months of configuration. The devices are the easy part — they move with you in a cardboard box. The automations, the dashboard, the integrations: those live in a file, and that file needs to be protected.

The four things that make your setup portable: automatic backups turned on in Settings → System → Backups; copies off the device via the Google Drive add-on or a pre-move manual download; a Zigbee coordinator backup exported separately; and your encryption passphrase stored somewhere you’ll actually find it.

Do those four things and no dead SD card, no failed update, and no moving day will cost you the smart home you built. If you’re still planning what to build in the first place, the no-drill configurator is a good starting point — and the hub selector will help you choose hardware that won’t let you down.