Home Assistant makes it easy to back up to the cloud if you have a Home Assistan Cloud Subscription. This is the primary method I use, as Home Assistant Cloud offers a lot of other useful features, such as secure remote access, and it’s good to know that my subscription goes toward supporting the development of Home Assistant.

You don’t need to pay for cloud backup, however. There are several ways to back up Home Assistant to the cloud without any subscription fees at all.

Backup to Google Drive for free

All you need is a Google Account

This is the method I used before I started backing up using Home Assistant Cloud, and it’s one I continue to use, as it’s free and gives me another copy of my backup should anything go wrong. All you need is a free Google account and the right integration, and you can automatically back up Home Assistant to the cloud. You get 15GB of free Google Drive storage with a Google account, although this is shared with other Google apps such as Gmail and Google Photos.

To use Google Drive for backups, go to Settings > Apps and click the Install app button. Click the three-dot menu at the top right of the screen and select Repositories. Paste the link to the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup app and click the + Add button. Close the window, and search for Google Drive in the search bar. Click the Home Assistant Google Drive Backup app in the results. Click the Install button.

Once the app has installed, click Start. Click the Open Web UI button, and you’ll be prompted to connect your Google account. Click the Authenticate with Google Drive button and select Send Credentials. If it doesn’t work, copy the Authorization String, paste it into the box in the app, and click Save.

Once authorized, you should see the app up and running. You can click Settings to make any changes to settings, such as how many backups to keep and which backups to ignore. The app should start uploading your backups to Google Drive, and will continue to run on the schedule you set.