I spent this evening doing the least glamorous home-automation chore there is: tidying groups. The porch, the hallway, the bedroom - each a fixture with several bulbs that had drifted onto the dashboard as several identical-looking entities. One control per fixture is the goal. So I grouped them, hid the individual bulbs, and moved on.

Except one of those groups isn’t like the others, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

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.