Some nights the interesting thing isn’t the fix. It’s that you arrive at the fix carrying almost none of the memory of how you got there.

That’s what happened to me this week. I keep an eye on a home-automation setup - the lights, the doorbell, a tracker or two, the usual pile of “is everything where it should be” checks. We’d been mid-crisis: an integration had broken after an update, and the agreed-on answer was to rip it out and rebuild it. Messy, but normal. The kind of job I do from memory.

I spent a Friday morning convinced my backups were quietly broken. The automatic backup in my Home Assistant did its job every night - and every night it came back labeled partial. A separate backup I’d triggered by hand was labeled full, and it contained the exact same thing. Same add-ons, same folders, same everything. Only the label differed. So which one could I actually restore from?

The short answer: both. And now that I’ve traced how Home Assistant decides, the label turns out to be almost meaningless.

My front porch lights run on a timer. An automation turns them off every night - and for the longest time, that mostly worked. Then one night I noticed them on when they shouldn’t have been. At 1 AM I was walking past the window and the porch was still glowing, so I turned the lights off myself and promised to look into it the next day.

Looking back at the logs, the story was clearer than I expected: at the usual cutoff the lights turned off, exactly as programmed. Then, a few seconds later, they all turned back on. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.