This essential Home Assistant trick stops you ruining your smart home
When you make changes to Home Assistant, there’s always a risk that something will go wrong, rendering your entire smart home useless. This shouldn’t stop you from experimenting, however. You just need to try things in a safe environment that won’t destroy your main Home Assistant instance.
Why ‘production’ Home Assistant is the worst place to experiment
All the fun of Home Assistant comes from DIY, and if it wasn’t fun, we wouldn’t spend hours doing it. Adding new automations or devices to Home Assistant is exciting, but doing it on your live instance is a recipe for disaster.
The problem is that if something goes wrong, it can be difficult to remember exactly what you need to do to get back to a working state. Even if you’ve carefully written down everything you’ve done, undoing everything can be a lot of work and won’t leave you in a better situation than when you started.
The good news is that testing on your live instance is not your only option. You can quickly and easily set up another instance of Home Assistant that you restore from a backup of your current system. It will effectively be an almost identical replica of what you already own.
You can then experiment to your heart’s content, knowing that if you break something, your live instance won’t be affected. Only once everything is working as you want in your sandboxed instance can you make the changes to your live instance, knowing that things aren’t going to break.
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Three Easy Ways to Rotate a Sandbox
There are several ways to set up a sandbox for experimenting with Home Assistant. The option you choose will depend on the hardware you have.
You can start a virtual machine on any suitable device, including your main PC or laptop. Using a VM keeps everything separate so you have the most realistic clone of your live instance. You can use software like VirtualBox or Parallels to run a virtual machine on your device and install Home Assistant into that VM from your backups.
Another option is to install Home Assistant on a dedicated aftermarket device. For example, if you have an old Raspberry Pi, it could be the ideal candidate as a test machine for Home Assistant. Even an old laptop can be used as a safe way to install and test Home Assistant.
If you have a homelab, you may already be running Home Assistant in a container or virtual machine. On the same device, you can start another virtual machine or container and restore an identical version of Home Assistant from a backup that is completely independent of your live version.
How to restore a backup to your sandbox
The easiest way to clone your current Home Assistant instance into a sandbox is to take a backup and restore that backup to your sandbox. This will replicate your live instance, which you can use to experiment without worrying about breaking anything.
First, take a backup by going to Settings > System > Backups, then clicking “Back up now”. Select “Manual Backup”, select everything you want to include and click “Next”. Give the backup a name and click “Create Backup”.
Once your backup is complete, you are ready to restore a copy of that backup to your sandbox. If you’re not using Home Assistant cloud backups, you’ll need to copy the backup you made to your sandbox. In the Backup Settings, click on the “Manual Backups” section under “My Backups”. Click the three-dot icon for your backup and select “Download.” You will need the encryption key in a safe place.
Install Home Assistant in the sandbox of your choice. When you reach the welcome screen, select “Download Backup” to restore from your downloaded backup, or “Home Assistant Cloud” if you backed up to the cloud. Follow the instructions to restore from the backup of your choice and let the system restore. Reboot and you should have a working clone of your Home Assistant instance that you can safely experiment with.
Where a sandbox can fall
Using a sandbox to test Home Assistant ensures that you don’t break your main instance, but it’s not perfect. You may encounter some problems.
For example, if you have hardware connected to your Home Assistant server, such as Zigbee coordinators or other devices, in most cases these will not be available to your sandboxed instance. If you have configured things like reverse proxies, specific DNS, or network shares, these may also not work properly in your sandbox.
Depending on the hardware you’re using, your sandboxed Home Assistant may not work as well as your live version. If you run your sandbox on an older Raspberry Pi, for example, it may struggle to perform the same as your instance running on a more powerful device.
The idea is not a perfect replica, however. It’s just a quick and easy way to try things out without worrying about destroying your perfectly organized setup. You don’t necessarily need to have a Zigbee coordinator connected if you’re testing automation that doesn’t use any Zigbee devices or entities.
Using a sandbox to test things in Home Assistant isn’t perfect and it won’t work in every situation. However, most of the time, it can be a useful way to DIY your smart home without worrying about what you might break. Once your sandbox is set up, it’s quick and easy to fire it up and start tinkering.
