Getting Started

Getting Started

1. Select a hardware profile

BackupCheckup reads only general Home Assistant system information such as installation type, architecture, and board. It uses this data to recommend a conservative runtime profile. The recommendation can be overridden at any time and does not change Home Assistant itself.

Home Assistant appliance is suitable for most dedicated systems. Older Raspberry Pi models benefit from Energy saving, while capable x86 systems can use Performance or Server.

2. Choose a monitoring policy

• Balanced is the recommended starting point: backups may be up to four days old and one storage location is required.
• Strict expects a backup no older than two days and at least two storage locations.
• Custom exposes every threshold separately.

The policy does not create backups. It only determines when BackupCheckup reports a problem.

3. Choose a verification strategy

• Manual: new backups are monitored, but fully read only on request.
• Automatic: every newly detected regular backup is structurally verified once.
• Deep verification: automatic structural verification plus an integrity check of the included Home Assistant SQLite database.

Start with Manual on resource-constrained systems. A complete check downloads the backup to private temporary storage and reads every archive.

4. Configure presentation and notifications

Choose Standard or Expert entity mode, optionally enable the panel, and decide whether mobile notifications should be sent. Notification targets must be enabled notify entities created by the Home Assistant Companion App.

5. Load the first status

Press Refresh backup data. BackupCheckup reads the native inventory and evaluates age, completeness, size, storage locations, automatic backup status, and known failures.

6. Run the first protection check

Press Check backup protection on the Recovery page or use button.backup_checkup_run_recovery_assessment.

Without the runner, the check performs:

1. selection of an available copy of the newest regular backup,
2. download to private temporary storage,
3. decryption when Home Assistant supplies the required password,
4. validation of metadata and all nested archives,
5. complete reading of every contained regular file,
6. optional SQLite integrity verification,
7. removal of temporary data.

With a connected runner, internal upload, temporary extraction, isolated boot, readiness probing, and cleanup follow automatically.

7. Complete Recovery Readiness

Open the Recovery page and review the emergency checklist. Do not enter passwords or notes; BackupCheckup stores only fixed states such as confirmed, missing, or not required. See Recovery-Readiness for details.