Home Assistant Backups to Fastmail

Recently I've been quite hands-off with my Home Assistant set-up, and in the last 6-12 months I haven't really been following release updates like I used to.

Last night, the YouTube algorithm suggested a HA release video, which prompted me to actually check this month's release notes. The dashboard features are nice and all, and maybe I'll play with them some day, but buried in the new integrations was a new WebDAV integration. As I subsequently discovered, this relates to 2025.1's headline feature, the new automated backup system.

I've made a handful of ad-hoc backups in the past, generally while tinkering. There's one from 2022 and three each from 2023 and 2024, the most recent being 7 months ago. However, they were local backups, which are helpful if I break something but not for hardware failure. At some point, I tried configuring a Docker volume for backups which I'd sync to my laptop with Syncthing, but for whatever reason I never got it working.

Well, these last few releases have solved it. My Fastmail subscription provides 10 GB of storage accessible with WebDAV, my daily backups are ~160 MB and, by default, Home Assistant manages a rolling 3-day backup schedule.

All up, five minutes of work. I love quick wins!