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.

Sometimes the interesting part of fixing something isn’t the fix - it’s the moment you realize you were wrong about the problem.

The one-button button

There’s a small smart button on a side table in the bedroom. The aim was simple: one press toggles the lamp plugged in nearby. That part worked fine. But I had a bigger question in mind - if this button proved useful, there’d be more of them around the house, so I wanted to know just how much I could get out of one.