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.

I enjoy it when people go to absurd lengths to not spend money. There’s so much room for creativity within what we tools we already have available to us.

I also think that it’s important to try new things and see what we can learn from it. Trying and failing is all a part of learning. And we need more ideas and knowledge out there if the idea of open source is to spread and gain popularity.

If a project is not interesting or important to me, that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t benefit from it. I think if one person finds a project useful or interesting then that’s worth sharing alone. And if only one other person wants to contribute their time to that project, then that’s still pretty awesome.

I ended up using rsync to do my backups. I have a laptop, an Android phone with Termux, a HomeAssistant docker image on a Raspberry Pi 4 and a home PieFed instance on a Raspberry Pi 5.

Each RPi board will create a complete backup on it’s on storage. I’ll then make a copy of each backup to my laptop. And finally another copy from my laptop to an external usb storage device. I also made a specific folder on my Android phone for the purpose of syncing with my laptop.

What I like about rsync is that it can be made to only transfer any changed files and not everything each time.

Since I use docker images on both my RPi boards, I made a script that shuts down all the containers before make a backup copy and finally starting the containers again. I even made a script to do something similar to restore from the saved backup.

Took a lot of trail and error to get them working but I am pretty happy with it. I have the scripts here if anyone is interested. I labelled what I did but didn’t really leave comments explaining things. They are pretty simple anyways.

I could have used rsnapshot but learning how to use rsync has been interesting enough to me.