Speaking for myself (but suspect a lot more of the viewers too) but I'd love more of your thoughts not just the facts. You are a well regarded member in the community and I trust your opinion.
Agreed. I think you've always done a great job of being reasonable and transparent whenever you have provided your personal opinion, so I would welcome your take on things in these release videos.
In my opinion, I think the word opinion could be one word but I would prefer to think that advice might be another. For example, I have been a HA adopter since the early days and have seen releases which I did not understand completely and the suffered from my lack of knowledge. I consider myself a reasonably switch on person to this stuff (Ex IT) but as I age (now 73) I find that keeping up is more time consuming and I don't do as much as I should. That said I like your videos and always watch you newer ones (a subscriber) so do trust your judgement and views. Now as an example I feel that the latest Backup saga is typical. There is a lot packed into this CRUCIAL part of the system and I was one who held off until the 2025.2.1 release. Fortunately my update went over without major issues as if it had give problems then my family would have been on my case. One thing I would love to see is a complete video on setting up the Backup that included the setting up of Google Drive and OneDrive and so on. These are sort of glossed over and the documentation is out of date as I write. I also don't understand some of the terminology. Now I am not sure this is opinion or another style of video but...? Anyway, Thanks for your videos and keep up the good work.
It is interesting to read people commenting on wanting more opinions. That, in my opinion, is a tough call, because it can then lead to misinterpretation and things being taken out of context and quoted. I do like the idea of having a bit of opinion from well regarded people such as Lewis. One important thing is to be able to distinguish between fact and opinion such that there is no doubt. Please keep the excellent videos coming. As a bit of a sideline, probably rhetorical, my opinion (after 20 years in IT DR) is that backups are worthless .... unless you test your recovery processes. It not a good place to be in trying to do a recovery because something is messed up only to find you did the backup wrong or missed a bit. I wonder how many actually do test recovery?
Yes this. More opinion please. If I just want a break down of the features I can skim the blog or have ChatGPT read it for me. I *want* people who live and breath this stuff to tell me their opinions, succinctly, but yes.
I will concur with others who said that I would love to hear you provide more analysis of updates like this one. You have a depth of knowledge/experience on the topic and a keen balance between informational and entertaining. Thanks!
I agree with others, that a more involved description and thoughts on each of the updates, would be very welcome. You will know how exciting and will understand the potential greatness of certain updates better than most of us average users!
To be fair to the core developers, they appear to have hit every single piece of constructive feedback the community offered. - It's a shame they do not collaborate when they're considering these features during development. "We're working on backups, what are the main pain points" and even "next month we're working on this plan for backups, what's missing?"
The one thing I have not found yet and in my defence I have only had HA for about a month, is the simple ability to set a solid background colour of dashboards and also change font size and colour. I might add that unlike all you seasoned users who have grown into HA since its birth or are YAML or any other code wizards, I am 70 years old and would like to do this in the VISUAL EDITOR and NOT code. Can I add that if you are going to spout random code to me without full instructions then don’t bother, I’ve looked at copy and paste of your code for hours and get nowhere. Thank you for the update on this year’s V2.0, one note is your assumption that we all know the abbreviations, LLM?, don’t worry I’ll look it up 😄
I honestly don't use the backup option inside of home assistant any more -- I run HA in Docker and I do backups on the container. But if I was still using those backups, I'd have been a bit cranky about the mandatory encryption setting.
Thanks for the update as always! Off topic, saw your sockets in the background and wanted to give a quick PSA that those socket covers aren't recommended to use in the UK. DYOR but many organisations and charities recommended against them as UK sockets already have built in shutters, which those covers cause to open, making that safety feature redundant
Very new Home Assistant user, here. I got an old Intel Mac Mini to install Home Assistant on, got a cute little Zigbee network up and running, and went through the somewhat laborious process of getting Local Tuya set up for a ceiling light. Then a couple weeks later, I decided to migrate to running Home Assistant under Proxmox on the same machine. I have Home Assistant Cloud, but I figured I'd make a local backup on my main computer too, just in case. When it was time to restore from my backup, I realized that my local backup was gone because I'd forgotten to pull it out of the temp downloads directory it had saved to. So then I grabbed the backup from Home Assistant Cloud only to find out that it was encrypted. I'd completely missed the fact that there was an encryption key that I needed to keep somewhere. So I started again from scratch.
i really dont get the anger of the community about the encrypted backups. backups containing sensitive data should ALWAYS be encrypted even when hosted locally. And the way the backup encryption was implemented was in such a sane way that theres no downside for it... all the negative feedback boils down to "im stubborn and dont like change"
@@RoofusKityup. One specific thing that must have caused users years of work over the HA user base for questionable benefit was removing weather forecasts being retrieved automatically. It took me a good 3 hours (I’m an intermediately skilled HA user I’d say) to implement my own automations and templates to overcome this change. Pretty much completely pointless.
That's why corporate software over time becomes bloated, unmaintainable ux nightmare. There is always a compromise to be made between maintaining support and going forward.
Many people are wondering where the Google Drive integration is. Does the addon still exist in this new version? Can you clearly describe (step by step) the installation of this native integration thank you
Hi, Thank you for your videos, I really enjoy them. I have a Smartthings hub and would like to replace it with the Home assistant green and a zigbee dongle. is the best way to do it is to start from scratch turning off my smartthings hub and connecting all my zigbee devices to HA ?
I believe, if you just want to dip your toes in for now, you can control SmartThings itself from Home Assistant and keep your things in place for now. However, the best way, in my opinion, is to connect things directly to Home Assistant and eliminate the dependency on SmartThings. This is the route I took about 4 years ago. You will be thrilled by how instantaneous and reliable things become!
Some well attack acting like children and forget the developers are human just like us. They wont always get it right anymore then we do and rather then calmly letting them know they rant. Frankly they should be happy the developers listen so well as many never do in other projects. Iam like many others are quite happy to see they are listening to feed back and changing things accordingly.
What would the upgrade/migration path look like from the Google Drive Backup Add-on to the new native version? Would it show the last several months of backups I already have in Google Drive or would I need to start from square one? Can I restore from the add on to the native backup integration?
I think I will wait for the point release before updating, got my fingers burnt last time as the update broke local tuya, Which wasn't mentioned in the breaking changes, so once bitten and all that, I shall wait :)
Speaking of Synology DSM, the EPLite configurator docker instance defaults to the same port as Synology Nas admin. It would be nice if that port were easily configurable. Maybe I'm just a newb, but it's been easier to move my synology nas interface port and then turn on the EPL configurator, play around, then disable the configurator and put my synology nas interface back on its default port.
You're a trusted contributor to the project, why wouldn't you speak the truth, anything else will damage your standing. You are the new news! Backup changes in Jan were bad, backup changes in Feb fixed almost all the bad but no-one has addressed restores. Please do some digging to work out what is the current status on restores.
I always speak the truth, but Iin this case I'm talking about personal opinions or preference which might not always be shared by everyone. But thanks, I'll work on it 😅
What i'm waiting for is the possibility to choose where the assistant responds from. I want to talk to my M5 atoms and choose my sonos speakers as output without fiddling with the code in the atoms themselves. You should also be able to choose any media players as output for the broadcasts and not just other assistant hardware.
Hi! Looking for a way to use google assistant to send bluetooth commands within home assistant, using Google Assistant SDK - Noticed your last vid was 4 years ago, and google have completely reworked the Oauth process - are there any updates? Any links or suggestions?
I'm not a Home Assistant expert. But from my research, it's gotten harder. As you've probably noticed, Google has deprecated their projects feature, killing one of the 3 ways to integrate. I forget what the second one was, I couldn't get it to work. (All vids have the same 3, should be easy to find and try for you). Honestly I gave up and used home assistant cloud. Not excited to have to pay for something overall, but at least it supports something good and it works well.
Awsome stuff. Lots of little featureettes to play with. Glad they saw sense with the encrypted backups. You certainly shouldn’t be afraid to give your opinions! OT: a number of studies have shown those kiddy mains plug covers increase the danger of sockets not reduce it. British plugs are the safest in the world and don’t need covers to be safe for inquisitive fingers.
@ and this google drive i tegration install is made more complicated than this GDrive Backup. What cloud consol, what OAuth consent screen? What OAuth client ID?
Hey, could you point me in the right direction with that? I guess it's not the previous Drive integration, as I have that but no Google Drive option on the native backup screen @@EverythingSmartHome
@@MarkSmithMCS better use old. Security features like backup must be intuitive not like this where you need find half internet how to turn it on. Whats wrong with login to google drive with your email and password that it need to be now so complicated?
I've been using HA many years and what I really don't like that it's like running water, they change it every month and you never know what features are dropped this time. Frustrating.
Humorous note: the bit about the change(s) to the backup before update feature reminded me that I recently had to rebuild my Home Assistant because of the 2025.1 update. My system ate itself… trying to perform the backup.
Is it just me or is he always way quieter than other RUclipsrs? I have my speakers set to half most of the time, but for him I always have to turn up to max and even then he's a bit quiet. Could buy better speakers for sure.
Not related but damn you not being in the center of the video is distracting me since the light post above you is the middle. But overall a great job on bringing the backup stuff
I like HA but something that frustrates me is the "hobbyist" approach to development. For example naming the back ups in a way that identifies them is just obvious and a professional designer would have done that from the start.
I had no idea backups changed last update. It's irritating because backups was working perfectly before and now I go look and its been 4 weeks since my HA backed up because I have to "configure backups" 😒😒😒 thankfully nothing happened to my server over the last month.
@@no1warr1or thats why it’s good plan to make automation what starts full backup and not reay HA integrated backup. They make changes and they say that “you didnt read changes document”
What is an analogue phone? We only have wifi/lan phones in our country. Are they those? Or are you referring to a phone line to an old school wired phone?
Hey, @Everything Smart Home - i just updated to 2025.2 but I can't see Google Drive storage option. Only Local, Network storage and Nabu Cloud are available? 6:31
I would really like to see a Proton Drive backup option. Although this is probably more so on the Proton team I'm guessing. I know I'm in a relatively small subset of people that use it.. but I am a happy Proton Unlimited customer.
pft. 8:38 Nobody is participating in a pie eating contest RIGHT before swimming with dolphins. Everybody knows you have to wait 30 min after eating before going in the water. ... /s love the updates!
Does it stop doing automatic backups if the system detects an error or is corrupted somehow? Does it alert you somehow you might be overriding a perfectly working instance with a possible non fully working one?
the client-side graphs are complete garbage, makes even my best computer slow to a crawl - yet I can't find a single other person complaining about it. And you didn't even mention it.
Devs should have though or at least start a poll. They asked for the negative comments. Ill stick with one drive Addon backup works much better than the native option and i am not forced to do what devs whant me to do
Speaking for myself (but suspect a lot more of the viewers too) but I'd love more of your thoughts not just the facts. You are a well regarded member in the community and I trust your opinion.
Thanks for the kind words and I'm very privileged to have your trust 🙏🏻
Agreed. I think you've always done a great job of being reasonable and transparent whenever you have provided your personal opinion, so I would welcome your take on things in these release videos.
There are plenty of channels without an opinion. A bit of opinion or a follow-up vlog with some deeper insight would be nice.
In my opinion, I think the word opinion could be one word but I would prefer to think that advice might be another.
For example, I have been a HA adopter since the early days and have seen releases which I did not understand completely and the suffered from my lack of knowledge.
I consider myself a reasonably switch on person to this stuff (Ex IT) but as I age (now 73) I find that keeping up is more time consuming and I don't do as much as I should.
That said I like your videos and always watch you newer ones (a subscriber) so do trust your judgement and views.
Now as an example I feel that the latest Backup saga is typical. There is a lot packed into this CRUCIAL part of the system and I was one who held off until the 2025.2.1 release. Fortunately my update went over without major issues as if it had give problems then my family would have been on my case.
One thing I would love to see is a complete video on setting up the Backup that included the setting up of Google Drive and OneDrive and so on. These are sort of glossed over and the documentation is out of date as I write. I also don't understand some of the terminology. Now I am not sure this is opinion or another style of video but...?
Anyway, Thanks for your videos and keep up the good work.
It is interesting to read people commenting on wanting more opinions. That, in my opinion, is a tough call, because it can then lead to misinterpretation and things being taken out of context and quoted. I do like the idea of having a bit of opinion from well regarded people such as Lewis. One important thing is to be able to distinguish between fact and opinion such that there is no doubt. Please keep the excellent videos coming. As a bit of a sideline, probably rhetorical, my opinion (after 20 years in IT DR) is that backups are worthless .... unless you test your recovery processes. It not a good place to be in trying to do a recovery because something is messed up only to find you did the backup wrong or missed a bit. I wonder how many actually do test recovery?
0:58 Honestly I wouldn't mind hearing some of your opinions on new stuff and changes, given your expertise with HA.
Yes this. More opinion please. If I just want a break down of the features I can skim the blog or have ChatGPT read it for me. I *want* people who live and breath this stuff to tell me their opinions, succinctly, but yes.
I don't know about expert, I'm just enthusiastic about it 😆
@@EverythingSmartHome If you are not an expert.... who is?
I will concur with others who said that I would love to hear you provide more analysis of updates like this one. You have a depth of knowledge/experience on the topic and a keen balance between informational and entertaining.
Thanks!
Appreciate that thank you 🙏🏻
I agree with others, that a more involved description and thoughts on each of the updates, would be very welcome. You will know how exciting and will understand the potential greatness of certain updates better than most of us average users!
I agree don't discourage development. This app is amazing.
To be fair to the core developers, they appear to have hit every single piece of constructive feedback the community offered. - It's a shame they do not collaborate when they're considering these features during development. "We're working on backups, what are the main pain points" and even "next month we're working on this plan for backups, what's missing?"
The one thing I have not found yet and in my defence I have only had HA for about a month, is the simple ability to set a solid background colour of dashboards and also change font size and colour. I might add that unlike all you seasoned users who have grown into HA since its birth or are YAML or any other code wizards, I am 70 years old and would like to do this in the VISUAL EDITOR and NOT code.
Can I add that if you are going to spout random code to me without full instructions then don’t bother, I’ve looked at copy and paste of your code for hours and get nowhere. Thank you for the update on this year’s V2.0, one note is your assumption that we all know the abbreviations, LLM?, don’t worry I’ll look it up 😄
I honestly don't use the backup option inside of home assistant any more -- I run HA in Docker and I do backups on the container. But if I was still using those backups, I'd have been a bit cranky about the mandatory encryption setting.
Thanks for the update as always! Off topic, saw your sockets in the background and wanted to give a quick PSA that those socket covers aren't recommended to use in the UK. DYOR but many organisations and charities recommended against them as UK sockets already have built in shutters, which those covers cause to open, making that safety feature redundant
Very new Home Assistant user, here. I got an old Intel Mac Mini to install Home Assistant on, got a cute little Zigbee network up and running, and went through the somewhat laborious process of getting Local Tuya set up for a ceiling light. Then a couple weeks later, I decided to migrate to running Home Assistant under Proxmox on the same machine. I have Home Assistant Cloud, but I figured I'd make a local backup on my main computer too, just in case.
When it was time to restore from my backup, I realized that my local backup was gone because I'd forgotten to pull it out of the temp downloads directory it had saved to. So then I grabbed the backup from Home Assistant Cloud only to find out that it was encrypted. I'd completely missed the fact that there was an encryption key that I needed to keep somewhere. So I started again from scratch.
i really dont get the anger of the community about the encrypted backups. backups containing sensitive data should ALWAYS be encrypted even when hosted locally. And the way the backup encryption was implemented was in such a sane way that theres no downside for it... all the negative feedback boils down to "im stubborn and dont like change"
I’d agree with you there. They are backups after all, the file contents is available on the production instance on HA.
As a corporate developer, our #1 rule was NEVER remove functionality until it was cleared by the users.
Home Assistant devs have a history of doing the opposite. And then they get really snarky when people get upset.
You definitely didn't work for Google.
@@RoofusKityup. One specific thing that must have caused users years of work over the HA user base for questionable benefit was removing weather forecasts being retrieved automatically. It took me a good 3 hours (I’m an intermediately skilled HA user I’d say) to implement my own automations and templates to overcome this change. Pretty much completely pointless.
That's why corporate software over time becomes bloated, unmaintainable ux nightmare. There is always a compromise to be made between maintaining support and going forward.
Thanks Lewis :)
Many people are wondering where the Google Drive integration is. Does the addon still exist in this new version? Can you clearly describe (step by step) the installation of this native integration thank you
Hi, Thank you for your videos, I really enjoy them.
I have a Smartthings hub and would like to replace it with the Home assistant green and a zigbee dongle. is the best way to do it is to start from scratch turning off my smartthings hub and connecting all my zigbee devices to HA ?
I believe, if you just want to dip your toes in for now, you can control SmartThings itself from Home Assistant and keep your things in place for now. However, the best way, in my opinion, is to connect things directly to Home Assistant and eliminate the dependency on SmartThings. This is the route I took about 4 years ago. You will be thrilled by how instantaneous and reliable things become!
Good Job 👍
Thank you.
Some well attack acting like children and forget the developers are human just like us. They wont always get it right anymore then we do and rather then calmly letting them know they rant.
Frankly they should be happy the developers listen so well as many never do in other projects.
Iam like many others are quite happy to see they are listening to feed back and changing things accordingly.
Exactly, at the end of the day we all just want home assistant to be the best it can possibly be
What would the upgrade/migration path look like from the Google Drive Backup Add-on to the new native version? Would it show the last several months of backups I already have in Google Drive or would I need to start from square one? Can I restore from the add on to the native backup integration?
I think I will wait for the point release before updating, got my fingers burnt last time as the update broke local tuya, Which wasn't mentioned in the breaking changes, so once bitten and all that, I shall wait :)
Speaking of Synology DSM, the EPLite configurator docker instance defaults to the same port as Synology Nas admin. It would be nice if that port were easily configurable. Maybe I'm just a newb, but it's been easier to move my synology nas interface port and then turn on the EPL configurator, play around, then disable the configurator and put my synology nas interface back on its default port.
I’m not saying I agree or disagree but I’d like to know what’s the issue with having the backups encrypted?
Nope, I’m here for the rambling and opinions too 😁
You're a trusted contributor to the project, why wouldn't you speak the truth, anything else will damage your standing. You are the new news! Backup changes in Jan were bad, backup changes in Feb fixed almost all the bad but no-one has addressed restores. Please do some digging to work out what is the current status on restores.
I always speak the truth, but Iin this case I'm talking about personal opinions or preference which might not always be shared by everyone.
But thanks, I'll work on it 😅
Doesn’t backing up to this system back up to your internal SSD? Isn’t that kinda pointless?
What i'm waiting for is the possibility to choose where the assistant responds from. I want to talk to my M5 atoms and choose my sonos speakers as output without fiddling with the code in the atoms themselves. You should also be able to choose any media players as output for the broadcasts and not just other assistant hardware.
Hi! Looking for a way to use google assistant to send bluetooth commands within home assistant, using Google Assistant SDK - Noticed your last vid was 4 years ago, and google have completely reworked the Oauth process - are there any updates? Any links or suggestions?
I'm not a Home Assistant expert. But from my research, it's gotten harder. As you've probably noticed, Google has deprecated their projects feature, killing one of the 3 ways to integrate. I forget what the second one was, I couldn't get it to work. (All vids have the same 3, should be easy to find and try for you). Honestly I gave up and used home assistant cloud. Not excited to have to pay for something overall, but at least it supports something good and it works well.
Awsome stuff. Lots of little featureettes to play with. Glad they saw sense with the encrypted backups. You certainly shouldn’t be afraid to give your opinions!
OT: a number of studies have shown those kiddy mains plug covers increase the danger of sockets not reduce it. British plugs are the safest in the world and don’t need covers to be safe for inquisitive fingers.
Where is this native google backup? It’s not in somwhere obvious location? Updated my test HA machine and try’d to find it and i dont find it.
You need to install the Google drive integration before it will show up, this is how you link your account
@ then its not “built in by default”… but thanks for answer 🤙🏻
@ and this google drive i tegration install is made more complicated than this GDrive Backup. What cloud consol, what OAuth consent screen? What OAuth client ID?
Hey, could you point me in the right direction with that? I guess it's not the previous Drive integration, as I have that but no Google Drive option on the native backup screen @@EverythingSmartHome
@@MarkSmithMCS better use old. Security features like backup must be intuitive not like this where you need find half internet how to turn it on. Whats wrong with login to google drive with your email and password that it need to be now so complicated?
Nice with beeing able to save unencrypted and look at files again. Now i can update home assistant
I've been using HA many years and what I really don't like that it's like running water, they change it every month and you never know what features are dropped this time. Frustrating.
another update already i...... i just got my last update fully working.
Nobody likes not opinionated videos. for that we can read releases, we come for opinions and toughts here. youtube is meant for opinions.
Humorous note: the bit about the change(s) to the backup before update feature reminded me that I recently had to rebuild my Home Assistant because of the 2025.1 update. My system ate itself… trying to perform the backup.
Do you think it's a good idea to go swimming with dolphins soon after a pie eating contest!😊
Strange but I cannot see any other location integration in the list. Only local. No Google no Microsoft or NAS like you have in video.
Muito obrigado! Conhecer e acompanhar as alterações é fundamental nessa plataforma!
Very good review, but a question : why there is no backup on an usb key? It would be very useful, but it seems to be a hard one to do?
Thanks mate
Is it just me or is he always way quieter than other RUclipsrs?
I have my speakers set to half most of the time, but for him I always have to turn up to max and even then he's a bit quiet. Could buy better speakers for sure.
Not related but damn you not being in the center of the video is distracting me since the light post above you is the middle.
But overall a great job on bringing the backup stuff
Why not keep the update videos like you have been doing .... then create an opinion video about the updates?
I like HA but something that frustrates me is the "hobbyist" approach to development. For example naming the back ups in a way that identifies them is just obvious and a professional designer would have done that from the start.
I had no idea backups changed last update. It's irritating because backups was working perfectly before and now I go look and its been 4 weeks since my HA backed up because I have to "configure backups" 😒😒😒 thankfully nothing happened to my server over the last month.
@@no1warr1or thats why it’s good plan to make automation what starts full backup and not reay HA integrated backup. They make changes and they say that “you didnt read changes document”
What is an analogue phone? We only have wifi/lan phones in our country. Are they those? Or are you referring to a phone line to an old school wired phone?
Yes, he means an old fashioned landline phone. In this case, though, it is plugged into a VOIP box which is integrated in Home Assistant.
I don't have the Google Drive backup option in 2025.2 - what do I miss here?
Make sure to install the Google drive integration first and then it will show up
Thanks for the video!
Hey, @Everything Smart Home - i just updated to 2025.2 but I can't see Google Drive storage option. Only Local, Network storage and Nabu Cloud are available? 6:31
You need to add the Google drive integration for it to show up
I just installed and configured the Google Drive Backup add-on last week. Any word in what will happen to the add-on when I upgrade to 2025.2?
@@unclerojelio6320 nothing, works like a charm. This new integration is not so user friendly not setup nor restore backup from there
Interesting changes - I'd always used the Google Drive backup add on, looks like no longer required. Hope that developer got some credit!
I would really like to see a Proton Drive backup option. Although this is probably more so on the Proton team I'm guessing. I know I'm in a relatively small subset of people that use it.. but I am a happy Proton Unlimited customer.
Hopefully someone will add it!
EDIT: I had to install the integration first lol my bad 🤦♂️
Are the backup locations aka Google Drive, One Drive etc not available on HA docker?
GENIUS. First create a problem by making a stupid update that no one asked. And then pause your work to fix that and roll back.
pft. 8:38
Nobody is participating in a pie eating contest RIGHT before swimming with dolphins. Everybody knows you have to wait 30 min after eating before going in the water.
...
/s
love the updates!
Does it stop doing automatic backups if the system detects an error or is corrupted somehow? Does it alert you somehow you might be overriding a perfectly working instance with a possible non fully working one?
I wonder if they added anything for backups 🤣
Just a lil 😂
the client-side graphs are complete garbage, makes even my best computer slow to a crawl - yet I can't find a single other person complaining about it. And you didn't even mention it.
Can you talk about moving from Google Drive Backup to the new backup system (with Google Drive as a target)
HA just keeps on getting better.
Such a cutie 🥰🥰 Perfect husband material. Tech nerd, gorgeous Scottish accent, very handsome 🥰
Stop bro
Ah my favorite Scottish RUclipsr. #theaccent
boring!
Do you have a cold, Mr. Home?
Nope just early in the morning 😆
Devs should have though or at least start a poll. They asked for the negative comments. Ill stick with one drive Addon backup works much better than the native option and i am not forced to do what devs whant me to do