Restore Home Assistant From Backup

The following are notes based on my experience with restoring Home Assistant from a backup. Keep these notes in mind before you restore a backup to make things easier:

General Notes

1. If restoring to a fresh HA install, you will need to find a way to get your backup copied over to HA. Using a laptop/desktop browser works well for this. Copy the backup to your computer and then upload it on the initial HA screen before setting anything up. Attempting to restore from a phone does not work well.
   1. Alternative you can configure your new HA install, then mount the network share containing your backup and restore from there. This is usually more work though.

Things Not Restored

Not everything is kept in backups and some things will be lost upon a full restore. This only applies if you are restoring on top of a fresh install. If you restore on top of your existing install then these should not be an issue:

1. Network Share configurations
   1. In System > Storage > Network storage. These configs are not kept in the HA backup. You will need to re-configure them manually. This can issues if your apps are expecting them to be there and they are not, or if you use them for Backups
2. SSH keys
   1. If you had configured SSH access to your HA server, you will need to set that up from scratch again