Disclaimer: Backup Facility is probably the wrong word here, but I currently nothing else comes to my mind

My parents would like to have a HomeAssistant. While thinking through the setup in their local network, dynDNS stuff aso., I realized that I could use their open ports to regularly backup my own stuff to there house as remote backup.

Now, as far as I understand, there is no native support for this in HomeAssistant. I just came across the Nextcloud Add-On, which spins up a full Nextclou instance in the background?

If so, my question would be about performance/hardware requirements for ~10 users:

  • can I run this smoothly on a Pi 5 (8GB)?
  • or do I need 16GB?
  • is the standard kit with passive cooling enough, or rather buy active cooling (with a fan?)
  • is this add-on maintained in a way, that I wouldn’t have to worry about critical security bugs, that aren’t covered by normal Nextcloud releases?

Thanks beforehand :)

  • @Damage@feddit.itEnglish
    8•3 days ago

    If you take charge of maintaining this system, maybe it would be easier to install HA supervised in a docker container and have another container for wireguard+syncthing.

    A pi5 with 8gb should be enough unless your parents’ HA is an hypertrophic installation with hundreds of devices.

  • @mac@lemm.eeEnglish
    3•2 days ago

    Check out SFTPGo for backups.

    Also, I wouldn’t open any ports on your parents network other than for something like wireguard

    I especially wouldn’t expose home assistant to the internet, as it’s quite lax on the security front.

    As for RAM, 8gig will be more than enough unless they have an ungodly amount of smart devices. I’d stay away from a raspberry pi when deploying to an offsite location, as they’re not very reliable long term. Get a NUC or something similar. I just picked up a gmktec n150/12gig soldered on amazon for like $130

  • tatersEnglish
    5•2 days ago

    I agree with Damage, a Docker containers may be more flexible compared to HomeAssistant add-ons. I currently have two Raspberry Pi’s. A Pi4 with a HomeAssistant container and a Pi5 with a simple file server, and a copy of Wikipedia and an unfederated PieFed instance which are all run from containers.

    I bought my Pi5 used and it already had a fan installed and judging by how often the fan runs, it seems like a good idea to have. Especially since it’s more powerful compared to the Pi4.

    If you’re comfortable working with terminal commands, you could simply use rsync for creating and maintaining backups. Works great for remote backups and file systems too. I’ve automated backups for my phone (Android with Termux) both Pi’s and my laptop. All those backups get sent to a partition on my laptop. Then that partition is completely backed up to an external SSD storage. Rsync compares files between the source folder and destination folder so that only the differences are transferred and sends less data. Tools like rsnapshot may simplify the whole process if you don’t have the time or energy to fiddle with rsync.

    I can share my docker compose file for HomeAssistant and some examples of my rsync commands if that’s a path you’re interested in.

  • @Zanathos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1•3 days ago

    Not sure if you’ve de-googled yourself or not but there is a Google Drive Addon that has a whole slew of options for backing up your HA config. I’m sure there are alternate HA add-ons. This may require HACS but not certain.