Home Assistant Google Drive Backup: built-in integration vs add-on

Home Assistant Google Drive Backup means an automatic Home Assistant backup to Google Drive. Early on, while setting up my smart home, these backups saved me more than once: YAML experiments, updates, broken integrations — a working copy still sits in the cloud even if the SSD or SD card is gone. This used to require the third-party add-on by sabeechen; now Google Drive connects to Home Assistant natively. If Home Assistant runs in a virtual machine, add whole-VM snapshots on top — see Home Assistant on Proxmox.

Updated in September 2026: added the built-in Google Drive integration (Home Assistant 2025.2+), the new automatic backup system with encryption, restoring, notifications and migrating off the add-on. The add-on guide is kept, with caveats about its maintenance.

Home Assistant Google Drive Backup: built-in integration or add-on

There are now two ways to set up a Home Assistant backup to Google Drive. The built-in integration plugs into the new backup system introduced in version 2025.1. The add-on is a separate app with its own schedule and web UI.

Aspect	Built-in integration	sabeechen add-on
Available since	Home Assistant 2025.2	2019, last release v0.112.1 — December 2023
Installation type	any: OS, Supervised, Container, Core	Home Assistant OS and Supervised only
Google access	your own OAuth credentials from Google Cloud	one-click sign-in through the author’s server
Schedule and retention	in Home Assistant backup settings	in the add-on web UI
Encryption	key from the emergency kit	archive password backup_password
Rotation	keep the last N	last N plus generations: days, weeks, months
Maintenance	Home Assistant team, Platinum quality	rare updates, bugs after 2025.1

For a new setup I recommend the built-in integration: it is maintained by the Home Assistant team, works on any installation type and does not depend on someone else’s authorization server. The add-on still makes sense if it is already set up and working, or if you need generational rotation such as keeping weekly and monthly copies.

How Home Assistant backups work

A Home Assistant backup is a .tar archive with the configuration, the history database, add-ons and the share, media and ssl folders. By default it is stored only on the device itself, in /backup. If the SSD dies or the memory card fails, the local backup is lost with it.

Since version 2025.1 Home Assistant has automatic backups: a schedule, a retention count and several locations — local, network storage, Home Assistant Cloud or cloud services through integrations. Archives are encrypted with a key delivered in the emergency kit file.

A good scheme is the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, two different media, one copy off-site. For a smart home that means a local copy, a NAS and Google Drive.

Setting up Home Assistant Google Drive Backup with the built-in integration

You need Home Assistant 2025.2 or newer and a Google account. Setup takes about fifteen minutes, most of it in Google Cloud.

Step 1. OAuth credentials in Google Cloud

1. Open the Google Cloud Console and create a new project, for example Home Assistant.
2. Enable the Google Drive API for this project.
3. Open Google Auth Platform and select Get started. In the wizard: App Information — an app name such as Home Assistant and your email; Audience — choose External (Internal is only available to Google Workspace accounts); Contact Information — your email again; Finish — accept the policy and select Create.
4. Open Branding and fill in the App domain block: set Application home page, Application privacy policy link and Application terms of service link to https://home-assistant.io, and add home-assistant.io under Authorized domains. Do not upload a logo — with one, Google requires app verification. Select Save: until you do, the Publish app button stays disabled.
5. Open Audience in the left menu and select Publish app. Google verification is not needed because only you use the app. If you leave the app in Testing, authorization expires every 7 days and uploads stop.
6. In Clients create a Web application client and add the authorized redirect URI https://my.home-assistant.io/redirect/oauth — exactly this address, with no trailing slash; it is not a placeholder. Leave Authorized JavaScript origins empty.
7. Copy the Client ID and Client Secret or download the JSON. You can view them later under Clients by opening the client. If the secret is hidden there, select Add secret and use the new one.

If you already connected Google Sheets, Google Mail or YouTube, you can reuse those credentials — just enable the Google Drive API in the same project.

Step 2. Connecting Google Drive in Home Assistant

1. Open Settings → Devices & services → Add integration and search for Google Drive.
2. Enter the Client ID and Client Secret from step 1.
3. Pick your Google account. A warning about an unverified app is expected, since the app is your own: confirm access.
4. On the My Home Assistant page check your instance URL and select Link Account.

A Home Assistant folder appears in Google Drive, with a separate subfolder for each installation. The integration can only see files it created and has no access to the rest of your Drive. You can rename the folder; if you delete it, the integration recreates it.

Step 3. Automatic backups to Google Drive

1. Open Settings → System → Backups and select to set up backups.
2. Download the emergency kit with the encryption key and store it outside Home Assistant.
3. Schedule — daily. Time — system optimal, or your own, for example at night.
4. Enable backups before updates — this is the most useful copy.
5. Number of copies — for example 7: backups older than a week are deleted automatically.
6. Data — untick media and share unless they hold something important.
7. Locations — enable Google Drive along with local storage. The cog next to each location turns encryption on or off.

To test the setup, select Backup now → Automatic backup and wait for the file to appear in Google Drive. The integration also adds sensors for used and available storage in the account and the total size of your backups. They update every 6 hours.

The encryption key and emergency kit

Automatic backups in Google Drive are encrypted. The key lives in the emergency kit text file, and without it the archive cannot be restored — neither on new hardware nor after a reinstall. Keep the key in a password manager such as Bitwarden or KeePassXC, not only on Home Assistant itself.

You can view or change the key in the backup settings. After a change, older backups still open only with the old key, so keep it until those copies are gone. A backup downloaded through the Home Assistant UI is decrypted on the fly, while a file downloaded straight from the Google Drive website stays encrypted.

How much Google Drive space you need

The free 15 GB is shared between Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. A backup of a small installation weighs 100–500 MB, but the history database and camera recordings grow it quickly. How to keep it small:

• exclude the media and share folders if they hold camera recordings — for example after setting up the Aqara G4 doorbell;
• shorten history retention in configuration.yaml — the default is 10 days;
• leave out heavy add-ons that are easy to reinstall;
• keep 5–7 copies in the cloud, not 30.

recorder:
  purge_keep_days: 7

The total backup size sensor from the Google Drive integration is handy on a dashboard, and the storage sensors can drive a notification when the account reaches 90%.

Notifications when a backup fails

The built-in Backup integration provides event.backup_automatic_backup with the result of the last automatic backup, plus timestamp sensors sensor.backup_last_successful_automatic_backup and sensor.backup_next_scheduled_automatic_backup. This automation notifies you when a backup fails:

alias: "Backup failed"
triggers:
  - trigger: state
    entity_id:
      - event.backup_automatic_backup
conditions:
  - condition: state
    entity_id: event.backup_automatic_backup
    attribute: event_type
    state: failed
actions:
  - action: notify.send_message
    target:
      entity_id: notify.my_device
    data:
      title: "Automatic backup failed"
      message: >-
        {{ state_attr('event.backup_automatic_backup', 'failed_reason') }}

And this one fires if there has been no successful backup for more than a day, for example because Home Assistant was off at the scheduled time:

alias: "Backup is stale"
triggers:
  - trigger: time
    at: "09:00:00"
conditions:
  - condition: template
    value_template: >-
      {{ states('sensor.backup_last_successful_automatic_backup')
         | as_timestamp(0) < now().timestamp() - 26 * 3600 }}
actions:
  - action: notify.send_message
    target:
      entity_id: notify.my_device
    data:
      message: "No successful backup for more than 26 hours"

Replace notify.my_device with your own notifier — the mobile app, Telegram or email.

Restoring Home Assistant from a Google Drive backup

If Home Assistant is running

Open Settings → System → Backups and pick a backup — Home Assistant shows where it is stored, including Google Drive. Choose what to restore: the whole system or selected folders and add-ons. Home Assistant restarts afterwards; log in with the username and password that were valid when the backup was made.

If you need a clean install

1. Download the right .tar file from the Home Assistant folder in Google Drive to your computer.
2. Reinstall Home Assistant and choose Upload backup on the welcome screen.
3. Select the file, choose what to restore and enter the key from the emergency kit.
4. Do not refresh the page during the restore: on a large installation it can take up to 45 minutes.

The same steps move Home Assistant to new hardware, for example from a Raspberry Pi to a mini PC or a virtual machine on Proxmox VE. The new device needs more free space than the old one used.

The sabeechen Home Assistant Google Drive Backup add-on

The add-on by sabeechen was the standard way to back up to Google Drive for years and has more than 3,500 stars on GitHub. However, its last release, v0.112.1, came out in December 2023, and after Home Assistant 2025.1 users reported upload errors. The add-on runs on Home Assistant OS and Supervised only.

Installing the add-on

1. Open Settings → Apps → Install app. Newer versions call add-ons apps; in older ones it is Settings → Add-ons → Add-on store.
2. Menu (three dots) → Repositories → add https://github.com/sabeechen/hassio-google-drive-backup.
3. Find Home Assistant Google Drive Backup, install and start it, and enable start on boot.
4. Open the add-on web UI and select Authenticate with Drive — no Google Cloud project is required.

Key add-on settings

Most options are easier to change in the add-on web UI, but they can also be set in YAML on the configuration tab:

days_between_backups: 1
backup_time_of_day: "03:00"
max_backups_in_ha: 2
max_backups_in_google_drive: 10
ignore_other_backups: true
backup_password: "!secret backup_password"

• days_between_backups — how often to back up, every 3 days by default;
• max_backups_in_ha and max_backups_in_google_drive — how many copies to keep locally and in Drive, 4 each by default;
• ignore_other_backups — leave other backups alone, such as Home Assistant’s own automatic backups;
• backup_password — archive password, best taken from secrets.yaml;
• generational_days, generational_weeks and friends — generational rotation, the add-on’s main advantage.

The add-on publishes binary_sensor.backups_stale and sensor.backup_state and sends a notification when backups fall behind schedule. See the add-on documentation for all options.

Important: do not run Home Assistant automatic backups and the add-on schedule at the same time. Backups would be created twice, and by default the add-on uploads other backups to Drive as well. Pick one approach or enable ignore_other_backups.

Migrating from the add-on to the built-in integration

1. Connect the Google Drive integration and set up automatic backups as described above.
2. Run an automatic backup manually and make sure it appears in the Home Assistant folder in Drive.
3. Stop the add-on, disable start on boot and uninstall it.
4. The add-on’s old backups stay in Drive. Keep the backup_password while you need them, then delete them manually.

Other backup locations: NAS, OneDrive, WebDAV

Google Drive is not the only option. Home Assistant can save backups to network storage over Samba or NFS, to OneDrive, to Home Assistant Cloud (one latest copy up to 5 GB) and to any WebDAV server — for example your own Nextcloud. You can enable several locations at once: local, a NAS and one cloud.

If you want to reach Home Assistant from outside to check on backups, see CloudPub for remote access without a public IP or OpenZiti for access without open ports.

Home Assistant Google Drive Backup FAQ