Home Assistant Backup Shell

A bash script to be used with the Shell extension in Home Assistant to deal with your backups.

Use this inconjunction with the Google Drive, Onedrive or your cloud backup solution of choice to implement your 3-2-1 backup strategy. 3 copies of backups. 2 on different storage media. 1 offsite backup.

Installation

Download remote-backup.sh into your /config folder
Ensure that it has the appropriate execute permissions: chmod a+x remote-backup.sh from terminal.
Edit remote-backup.sh. The configuration options are at the top of the file.
Include the following in your configuration.yaml

shell_command:
  remote-backup: '/bin/bash /config/remote-backup.sh'

Restart Home Assistant

If successful you should have a new service called shell_command.remote-backup. Call this from your automations to run your secondary backup and automatically cleanup your backups.

Configuration

Variable	Description
local_dir	Where to look for local backups. Leave it as /backup/ if you are using a default installation.
remote_dir	Where to copy backups to a secondary drive (where you have mounted your samba share). Typically in HA this will be `/share/[name]`. Do not mount your samba share as a backup directory - HA will use this for primary backups instead. Instead, use the `Share` option.
local_backups	How many local backups to keep. N.B. This script cannot differentiate between full and partial backups. 0 is infinite and will skip this option.
remote_backups	How many remote backups to keep. N.B. This script cannot differentiate between full and partial backups. 0 is infinite and will skip this option.
local_expire	How many days until local backups are considered expired and deleted. 0 is infinite and will skip this option.
remote_expire	How many days until remote backups are considered expired and deleted. 0 is infinite and will skip this option.

Tips and Tricks

Only remove expired backups

Set local_backups=0 and local_expire to your desired days. Similarly for the remote settings.

Interaction of local_backups and local_expire

These operate on an OR basis.

For example, if local_backups=50 and local_expire=90. Any backup that is 51st and so-on (sorted from newest to oldest) or older than 90 days will be deleted.

I want a sensor for how many backups I have

This is easily done using the command_line integration.

command_line:
  - sensor:
      name: Local Backups
      unique_id: sensor.command_line_local_backups
      icon: mdi:backup-restore
      unit_of_measurement: backup(s)
      command: 'ls /backup/ | wc -l' # List files/ directories in your backup folder. Note this is naive and assumes everything in your backups folder is a backup
      state_class: measurement
      scan_interval: 3600 # Scan every hour because this doesn't need to update that quickly
  - sensor:
      name: Remote Backups
      unique_id: sensor.command_line_remote_backups
      icon: mdi:backup-restore
      unit_of_measurement: backup(s)
      command: 'ls /share/remotebackup/ | wc -l' # List files/ directories in your remote backup folder. Note this is naive and assumes everything in your backups folder is a backup
      state_class: measurement
      scan_interval: 3600 # Scan every hour because this doesn't need to update that quickly
  - sensor:
      name: Latest Local Backup
      unique_id: sensor.command_line_latest_local_backup
      command: 'find /backup/ -type f -exec stat -c "%Y" {} \+ | sort -nr | head -n 1' # List files/ directories in your remote backup folder. Note this is naive and assumes everything in your backups folder is a backup
      value_template: '{{ as_datetime(value|replace(" ","*",1)|replace(" ","")|replace("*"," ")) }}' # Hack to deal with output not being a python datetime object
      device_class: timestamp
      scan_interval: 3600 # Scan every hour because this doesn't need to update that quickly
  - sensor:
      name: Latest Remote Backup
      unique_id: sensor.command_line_latest_remote_backup
      command: 'find /share/remotebackup/ -type f -exec stat -c "%Y" {} \+ | sort -nr | head -n 1' # List files/ directories in your remote backup folder. Note this is naive and assumes everything in your backups folder is a backup
      value_template: '{{ as_datetime(value|replace(" ","*",1)|replace(" ","")|replace("*"," ")) }}' # Hack to deal with output not being a python datetime object
      device_class: timestamp
      scan_interval: 3600 # Scan every hour because this doesn't need to update that quickly