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Uploading a Snapshot to a Fresh Home Assistant OS Instance

Hi!

After finding that my previously running Home Assistant OS instance was no longer working let alone starting properly, I decided to wipe it and simply install from a fresh image today. In order to pick up where I left off, I wanted to restore from a snapshot that I made a short while ago.

Out of the box, Home Assistant OS does not seem to come with any way to upload snapshots (or any other kind of files) onto the instance. Usually, this would not be a problem, because I had previously used the Samba share add-on from the official add-on repository, but since updating it to the new repository website, the Samba share add-on seems to have disappeared.

My first alternate approach using the SSH access did not work either, as I could not use SFTP because it is not effectively using proper SSH/SFTP but an intermediate wrapper for the Home Assistant console.

The quickest way I found that had minimal impact on the system in terms of creating a mess was to use Docker and download my latest snapshot from a web server hosted somewhere else via cURL. In this case I was using a self-hosted Nextcloud instance with a shared file link, but your mileage may of course vary.

Prerequisites / Assumptions

1. You are using the Home Assistant OS official image on a device in headless mode, so you have a minimal system without neat tools like curl or wget pre-installed.
2. You have uploaded the snapshot file to a web server that is accessible from the Home Assistant OS system (in terms of network connectivity).

Steps

1. Enable SSH access by following the official documentation on how to enable SSH access to the host.
   • Update from 2020-05-21: They seem to have restructured the documentation and the original instructions are no longer on that page. It used to say:
     Use a USB drive formatted with FAT, ext4, or NTFS and name it CONFIG (case sensitive). Create an "authorized_keys" file (no extension) containing your public key, and place it in the root of the USB drive. File needs to be ANSI encoded (not UTF-8) and must have Unix line ends (LF), not Windows (CR LF). [...] From the UI, navigate to the Supervisor system page and choose "Import from USB". You can now access your device as root over SSH on port 22222. Alternatively, the file will be imported from the USB when the Home Assistant OS device is rebooted.
2. Log into the Home Assistance OS instance via SSH.
3. Type the command "login" to enter the actual shell.
4. Use the following command to download the snapshot file:
   docker run --rm curlimages/curl https://my.server.local/a1b2c3d4.tar > /mnt/data/supervisor/backup/a1b2c3d4.tar
   (Change URL and file names of course. The destination directory should be fine.)
5. You might want to check file integrity for the file via md5sum or sha512sum etc.
6. If you want to be extra tidy, you can remove the cURL Docker image again by executing
   docker image rm curlimages/curl
7. Close the SSH session and open a new one.
8. Do not enter the actual shell but instead execute this command to get Home Assistant to notice the newly uploaded snapshot:
   snapshots reload
9. Now log into the Home Assistant web interface or just keep using the console and restore what you need.
10. Done!

I hope this saved you a bunch of research because I myself could not find anything quick and practical on this topic.

Thanks for reading!

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