The 2026 Home Assistant Backup Guide: Cloud, NAS and SSD Options Compared

Home Assistant is the quiet workhorse of a modern smart home. It coordinates your lighting, heating, security cameras and media players, and it quietly stores every automation, scene and device preference you have carefully built up over months. If that configuration vanishes with a corrupted SD card, a failed upgrade or a power cut mid-write, you can spend days — sometimes weeks — rebuilding it from scratch. A proper backup routine turns that catastrophe into a ten-minute restore. This home assistant backup guide draws on official Home Assistant documentation, manufacturer specifications and owner consensus across community forums to compare the leading hardware, services and software strategies available in the UK for 2026.

Quick Picks

Why Home Assistant Backups Fail — and Why You Need More Than One

The most common theme in owner reviews and forum discussions is that data loss rarely announces itself. A microSD card in a Raspberry Pi silently wears out after thousands of write cycles; a firmware update writes half a database and then loses power; an automation edit contains a typo that breaks your entire configuration on restart. According to community feedback on r/homeassistant, these are the scenarios that send people back to first principles — and the ones a single backup strategy cannot always cover.

The built-in backup system in Home Assistant creates a compressed .tar file of your configuration, automations, scenes, entities and add-on settings, stored in the /backups folder. That is an excellent foundation, but a backup stored on the same SD card as the installation it protects is not a backup at all — it is a copy that dies with the original. The 3-2-1 rule exists precisely because media fail in ways you do not predict. You want three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with at least one copy kept off-site.

What a Standard .tar Backup Actually Contains (and Doesn’t)

Before choosing products, it helps to understand exactly what Home Assistant stores and, crucially, what it does not. According to the official HA documentation, a standard backup captures configuration.yaml, secrets.yaml, the .storage/ directory, and add-on configuration only. It does not capture add-on persistent data volumes by default. That distinction is the single most overlooked aspect of smart-home backups.

The Frigate Problem

If you run Frigate for AI-powered camera detection, this gap matters enormously. Frigate’s footage and database are explicitly excluded from standard backups. Attempting to include them blindly can corrupt or bloat the backup file — and according to community sentiment on r/homeassistant, this is the single most-upvoted mistake Frigate users make. Owners routinely report multi-gigabyte .tar files that fail to restore, all because Frigate’s /media and database folders were not manually excluded or handled separately. The official HA documentation on partial backups explains how to exclude specific directories, and Frigate users should treat this as mandatory reading rather than optional fine-tuning.

Zigbee2MQTT and Z-Wave Coordinator Keys

Your backup captures the Zigbee2MQTT add-on configuration, but its runtime database — located at zigbee2mqtt/database.db — may not be included, depending on the add-on version you run. More importantly, the coordinator backup file lives at /config/zigbee2mqtt/coordinator_backup.json and must be backed up separately, outside the standard .tar archive. If your coordinator stick dies and you lack this file, you face a full re-pair of every Zigbee device in your home.

For Z-Wave, the process is different but equally critical. Z-Wave JS UI allows you to take a controller backup via Settings → Controller → Create Backup, which produces a .json NVM (non-volatile memory) backup file. The official Z-Wave JS documentation explicitly warns that restoring a network key to a different Silicon Labs chipset generation — for example, moving from a 500-series stick to a 700-series stick — may require a full re-pair of all devices. The chipset generation matters because the NVM format differs between silicon families, so what looks like a straightforward restore can silently fail to re-establish your mesh network.

The 3-2-1 Rule, Applied to a Smart Home

The 3-2-1 rule — three copies, two media types, one off-site — translates neatly to a Home Assistant environment. Your first copy is the live installation itself. Your second copy might be a local .tar file written to a Samsung T7 Shield SSD connected via USB. Your third, off-site copy could be a daily encrypted upload to Nabu Casa’s cloud or a free Google Drive add-on. The key is that no single failure — SD card death, house fire, corrupted upgrade — can take out all three copies simultaneously.

Product Reviews

Nabu Casa — Home Assistant Cloud

Best for: Hands-off, officially supported encrypted cloud backups with zero infrastructure to maintain.

Nabu Casa is the subscription service developed alongside Home Assistant itself, and it represents the simplest path to a compliant off-site backup. A subscription costs approximately £6.50 per month or approximately £65 per year — prices that have shifted before, so it is worth verifying against the nabu.casa/pricing page at the time of publication. What you get for that fee is AES-256 encryption of your backup data, as documented in Nabu Casa’s official technical documentation. AES-256 is the same encryption standard used by banks and government agencies, meaning that even if the cloud storage were compromised, the backup contents remain unreadable without your key.

The service retains up to 3 backup copies in the cloud, according to the official Nabu Casa documentation as of 2026. Backups are triggered daily and automatically by Home Assistant’s own backup schedule, so there is no manual intervention required once the toggle is switched on. The practical implication of the 3-copy retention limit is that you can roll back up to three days — useful for a bad automation push, but not for discovering a problem that crept in over a fortnight. For longer retention, you would need a complementary solution.

Standout strength: Zero-configuration encrypted off-site backups from the official HA team, meaning no API keys to manage, no storage buckets to provision and no compatibility concerns after HA updates.

Honest caveat: The 3-copy retention ceiling is relatively shallow. If you need weeks or months of rollback history, Nabu Casa alone will not cover it.

Verdict: The single best “set it and forget it” option for most Home Assistant users in 2026.

Where to buy: Subscribe directly at nabu.casa.

Synology DiskStation DS224+ — NAS Integration

Best for: Users who want versioned, locally controlled network backups with enterprise-grade filesystem protection.

The Synology DS224+ is a two-bay network-attached storage enclosure that connects to Home Assistant in one of two ways. The first is via the Samba Backup add-on, available through the HA add-on store, which handles the transfer automatically. The second is via HA’s built-in network storage feature, found at Settings → System → Storage → Add Network Storage, which mounts the NAS as an SMB or NFS target directly into Home Assistant. Either method gets your .tar files off the SD card and onto redundant disks.

The DS224+ runs Synology’s DSM operating system on the Btrfs filesystem. Btrfs matters here because it supports copy-on-write snapshots, meaning the filesystem can capture a point-in-time state of your data without duplicating the entire file set. You can take snapshots via Synology Hyper Backup or Snapshot Replication, with frequency configurable down to hourly. If an automation goes wrong at 2 PM and you only notice at 6 PM, an hourly snapshot means you lose at most one hour of changes rather than the entire day. Synology’s official specifications also confirm that the DS224+ supports Btrfs inline deduplication, which reduces storage consumption when multiple backups contain identical configuration blocks.

Pricing for the DS224+ is approximately £280–£320 diskless at Amazon UK or Scan.co.uk — though you should verify current pricing at publication, as NAS hardware fluctuates. Note that this is a diskless unit: you will need to budget for one or two hard drives on top of the enclosure itself.

Standout strength: Btrfs snapshots with user-configurable frequency down to hourly, giving you granular rollback capability that cloud services with fixed retention limits cannot match.

Honest caveat: The initial cost is the highest of any option in this guide, especially once you factor in hard drives, and the setup requires basic networking knowledge.

Verdict: The gold standard for users who want full local control over backup frequency, retention and versioning.

Where to buy: Amazon UK or Scan.co.uk.

Samsung T7 Shield (1 TB) — Local SSD

Best for: Fast, physically rugged local backups and rapid restores when network infrastructure is unavailable.

The Samsung T7 Shield is a portable solid-state drive with a 1 TB capacity, rated IP65 for dust and water resistance. The IP65 rating means it is sealed against dust ingress entirely and protected against low-pressure water jets from any direction — so a burst pipe in the cupboard where your Pi lives will not necessarily destroy your backups. It connects via USB 3.2 Gen 2, which offers a theoretical maximum throughput of 10 Gbps, making both backup creation and restoration significantly faster than writing to a microSD card or a spinning hard drive.

In a Home Assistant context, the T7 Shield mounts via HA’s USB storage interface on standard installations, or manually via fstab on generic Linux installs such as HA OS running on a dedicated mini PC. The practical benefit of an SSD over a USB flash drive is write endurance: SSDs use wear-levelling controllers that distribute writes across memory cells, meaning they survive far more backup cycles than a cheap USB stick before degrading. Pricing is approximately £90–£110 at Amazon UK.

Standout strength: Physical ruggedness combined with USB 3.2 Gen 2 speed, making it the fastest and most durable local backup target in this guide.

Honest caveat: It is a single drive with no redundancy — if the SSD itself fails, the backup is gone, so it should be paired with a cloud or NAS copy rather than used alone.

Verdict: The best portable, fast local backup target for users who want physical copies they can grab and go.

Where to buy: Amazon UK.

Home Assistant Google Drive Backup (sabeechen/hassio-google-drive-backup)

Best for: Free, automated off-site cloud backups with granular control over what gets included.

This community-developed add-on, hosted at github.com/sabeechen/hassio-google-drive-backup, has accumulated over 6,000 GitHub stars — a strong indicator of both adoption and active maintenance. It supports partial backups, meaning you can exclude large folders such as Frigate media to prevent the exact corruption and bloat problems discussed earlier. This is the add-on that dominates r/homeassistant recommendation threads: a thread with over 800 upvotes (found by searching “backup strategy 2024 r/homeassistant”) consistently names the Google Drive add-on as the default free recommendation for off-site protection.

The add-on is free and authenticates with your Google account, uploading Home Assistant backup files to Google Drive automatically on a schedule you define. Because it supports partial backups, you can configure it to capture your configuration, automations and add-on settings while explicitly excluding the directories that cause problems — such as Frigate’s /media folder or its database. The practical effect is that your cloud backups stay small, fast to upload and reliable to restore.

Standout strength: Free, widely trusted and specifically designed to handle the partial-backup scenarios that Frigate and other media-heavy add-ons create.

Honest caveat: It relies on your personal Google Drive storage quota, so users with large configurations or long retention policies may eventually need to purchase additional Google One storage.

Verdict: The default free off-site backup solution that the Home Assistant community overwhelmingly recommends.

Where to buy: Install directly from the Home Assistant add-on store or the GitHub repository.

Backblaze B2 — S3-Compatible Object Storage

Best for: Ultra-low-cost, infinitely scalable off-site storage for advanced users comfortable with S3 configuration.

Backblaze B2 is an S3-compatible object storage platform that costs approximately $0.006 per GB per month. To put that in context, a typical Home Assistant backup of 500 MB would cost well under one cent per month to store — making B2 dramatically cheaper than any consumer cloud subscription if your backup footprint is modest. Home Assistant (from version 2024.6 onwards) supports custom backup locations, meaning you can configure B2 as an S3-compatible storage target directly within HA’s built-in backup system. No third-party add-on is strictly required, though the configuration does demand familiarity with S3 endpoints, access keys and bucket policies.

The S3 compatibility is the key mechanism here: because B2 speaks the same API language as Amazon S3, any tool or script designed for S3 storage works transparently with B2. That includes HA’s native backup location feature, which simply treats B2 as another writable destination. Alongside the Google Drive add-on, Backblaze B2 is frequently named in r/homeassistant recommendation threads as a preferred option for users who want programmatic control over their off-site backups without relying on a consumer cloud product.

Standout strength: Unbeatable cost-per-gigabyte for off-site storage, with native HA integration requiring no third-party middleware.

Honest caveat: Configuration requires technical comfort with S3 APIs, bucket permissions and access key management — this is not a toggle-and-go solution like Nabu Casa.

Verdict: The best option for technically inclined users who want maximum control at minimum cost.

Where to buy: Sign up directly at backblaze.com.

How to Choose the Right Backup Strategy

The right backup strategy depends on three factors: your technical comfort, your budget and the complexity of your Home Assistant installation.

If you run Frigate or other media-heavy add-ons, your first priority is configuring partial backups that exclude large media folders. Without this step, every backup strategy in this guide will produce bloated or corrupted .tar files. The Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on handles this natively, and Nabu Casa’s daily backups will also benefit if you have configured your HA backup settings to exclude Frigate directories.

If you want the simplest possible setup, Nabu Casa is unmatched. Switch on the cloud backup toggle, confirm that daily backups are running, and you have a compliant 3-2-1 off-site copy with AES-256 encryption and no infrastructure to maintain. The trade-off is the 3-copy retention limit.

If you want granular versioning and local control, a Synology DS224+ with Btrfs snapshots gives you hourly rollback points that no cloud service can match. Pair it with a Samsung T7 Shield for a secondary local copy that is physically portable.

If you want off-site protection without a subscription, the Google Drive add-on is the community-endorsed default. For users who need more storage than Google’s free tier provides, Backblaze B2 at approximately $0.006/GB/month is the most cost-effective upgrade path.

If you use Zigbee2MQTT or Z-Wave JS, none of the products above fully protects your coordinator on its own. You must manually back up /config/zigbee2mqtt/coordinator_backup.json and take regular Z-Wave NVM backups via Z-Wave JS UI → Settings → Controller → Create Backup. Store these files alongside your .tar backups, and remember the chipset-generation warning: restoring a Z-Wave network key across different Silicon Labs chipset generations (such as 500-series to 700-series) may require a full re-pair.

UK Practical and Regulatory Notes

For UK users, all the products and services in this guide are readily available. The Synology DS224+ is stocked by Amazon UK and Scan.co.uk, both of which offer UK warranty support under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The Samsung T7 Shield is widely available through Amazon UK. Nabu Casa is a digital subscription with no UK-specific regulatory considerations beyond standard GDPR compliance for personal data transmitted to cloud servers — the AES-256 encryption documented by Nabu Casa means your backup data is encrypted in transit and at rest, satisfying the data-protection principle of appropriate technical measures.

Backblaze B2, while priced in US dollars, is accessible globally and bills on a per-GB basis with no UK-specific surcharges. Exchange-rate fluctuations will affect the sterling-equivalent cost, but at approximately $0.006/GB/month the per-month cost for a typical Home Assistant backup remains negligible regardless of exchange-rate movement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the standard Home Assistant backup include my Frigate camera footage?

No. According to the official HA documentation, standard backups capture add-on configuration only, not persistent data volumes. Frigate footage and its database are explicitly excluded. You must manually configure partial backups if you want to include or exclude specific Frigate directories, and failing to do so is the most commonly reported cause of corrupted or bloated backup files on r/homeassistant.

How do I back up my Zigbee network so I don’t have to re-pair every device?

The Zigbee2MQTT coordinator backup file is stored at /config/zigbee2mqtt/coordinator_backup.json. This file is not included in the standard .tar backup by default, so you must back it up separately. Copy it to your NAS, SSD or cloud storage alongside your regular HA backups. Without this file, a failed coordinator stick means re-pairing every Zigbee device in your home.

Can I restore my Z-Wave network to a different controller stick?

It depends on the chipset generation. The official Z-Wave JS documentation warns that restoring a network key to a different Silicon Labs chipset generation — for example, moving from a 500-series to a 700-series controller — may require a full re-pair of all devices. Always take a controller backup via Z-Wave JS UI → Settings → Controller → Create Backup before swapping sticks, and if you are changing chipset generations, be prepared for the possibility of re-pairing.

How many backups does Nabu Casa retain, and how often does it back up?

According to Nabu Casa’s official documentation as of 2026, the service retains up to 3 backup copies in the cloud. Backups are triggered daily and automatically by Home Assistant’s own backup schedule. The practical implication is that you can roll back up to three days — useful for recent mistakes, but insufficient if you need longer retention. For extended version history, pair Nabu Casa with a NAS or the Google Drive add-on.

Is the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on free to use?

Yes, the add-on itself is completely free and open-source. However, it uploads backups to your personal Google Drive, which has a storage quota. Users with large configurations or long retention policies may eventually need to purchase additional Google One storage. The add-on supports partial backups and folder exclusions, so you can minimise storage consumption by excluding large directories such as Frigate media.

How much does Backblaze B2 cost for storing Home Assistant backups?

Backblaze B2 costs approximately $0.006 per GB per month. For a typical Home Assistant backup of around 500 MB, the monthly storage cost is well under one cent. HA version 2024.6 and later supports custom backup locations, so you can configure B2 as an S3-compatible target directly within Home Assistant’s built-in backup system without needing a third-party add-on.

Can I connect my Synology NAS directly to Home Assistant for backups?

Yes, via either the Samba Backup add-on from the HA add-on store or HA’s built-in network storage feature at Settings → System → Storage → Add Network Storage, which supports SMB and NFS mounts. The Synology DS224+ runs Btrfs, which supports hourly snapshots via Synology Hyper Backup or Snapshot Replication, giving you far more granular rollback points than a daily cloud backup.