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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/aquifer-index-67 on 2025-02-23 14:07:12+00:00.

I’m pretty new to Home Assistant, and recently switched from a HA Green to a mini PC. I found a video on YT that was extremely helpful, and the process went very smoothly. Until I got to the restore part.

I installed HA on bare metal, meaning it is its own operating system, not running as a virtual machine. When I got it installed, I navigated to the HA mini PC using my local web browser as instructed. All good. At that point it asked me if I wanted to set up a new account or restore from backup.

No matter what I tried, it would not restore from the backup I had on my local NAS. I tried all three backup .tar files to no avail. The error stated “Failed to start restore. Unknown error” every time I tried. My NAS backups are not encrypted, but I copied and pasted them to my local hard drive thinking maybe there was an authentication problem between HA and my NAS. Nope. Didn’t work from there either.

All of the dialog indicated that it was restoring a partial backup. It seemed to me that they should be FULL backups, but nothing in the HA settings gave me any choice about the magnitude of said backups. Mine seemed to be just regular backups.

Prior to this process I had updated my HA to the latest release as I always do, and did a fresh backup (twice actually, just to be sure I had a good copy).

I still had my Green, so I turned off the new mini PC and plugged in the Green and tried making a new backup yet again. Unplugged the Green and turned on the mini PC to try again. Same error.

The solution for me was to set up the new mini PC instance as a new user and restore the backup from there. I chose something like Test as the user and set up a simple junk password just to get it going. Once I got in, I could then restore from my backup, and it worked perfectly.

When the restore was complete, it asked me to log in. At that point I used my “real” HA credentials, not the fake temporary one. It logged me in as expected and it’s been humming along perfectly now.

What I don’t know is what would have happened if I had tried to set up a new user by using my existing HA credentials. I didn’t want to try, but if anyone has done that and it worked, please let me know.

There is either something crucial that I do not know, or else the Restore process needs to work better. Or at least better instructions on screen that your backup isn’t going to work until such and such procedure is performed.

Hopefully someone running into this will find this helpful. Once I did the above, everything worked perfectly. The only subsequent problem was that I had to re-connect my NAS for backups, but that went fine.