This week I have been looking at backups—the sort of subject that feels rather dull right up until the moment something breaks.
If you run Home Assistant on Proxmox, it is very easy to take a snapshot and feel protected. Snapshots are useful, but they are not the same thing as having a proper backup somewhere away from the machine.
Home Assistant backups, encryption keys and Proxmox snapshots
Friday’s video starts inside Home Assistant: what the automatic backup settings do, what to include, and why you need to keep the backup encryption key somewhere safe.
I also look at where the backup files actually live. A backup stored on the same computer as Home Assistant is convenient, but it will not be much help if that computer—or its storage—fails. I keep local copies and an off-site copy in OneDrive, and I take an extra backup before making important changes.
Then I move into Proxmox and demonstrate a snapshot properly: take the snapshot, install updates, roll back, and check that the updates are waiting again afterwards.
That is what a snapshot is good at: quickly undoing a change. It is not a replacement for a separate Home Assistant backup.
Watch Home Assistant on Proxmox: Is Your Snapshot Really a Backup?
Home Assistant 2026.10: useful automations without inventing IDs
Home Assistant 2026.10 was released on 7 October, and my favourite change is the improved trigger-ID interface.
Trigger IDs let one automation react differently depending on what started it. They have been available for years, but they were tucked away and you had to create and remember the IDs yourself. The new interface lets you select the relevant triggers in a condition while Home Assistant handles the IDs behind the scenes.
The release also brings a sharper OpenStreetMap-based map, a tidier profile page, a Modbus connections panel, easier AI connections and 15 new integrations.
Before updating, take a usable backup and read the backward-incompatible changes. One change worth noticing is that usernames are now normalised to lowercase with spaces removed from the beginning and end.
Read the official Home Assistant 2026.10 release notes
One thing for this week
Find your Home Assistant backup encryption key and confirm that you can get to it without relying on Home Assistant itself. Then check that at least one recent backup lives somewhere other than the machine running Home Assistant.
If the only copy is beside the original, it is less of a backup and more of a travelling companion.