Your automatic backup says 'partial'. Stop worrying about the label.

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.

Home Assistant’s backup manager - the thing behind pretty much every backup you create, whether from the UI, on a schedule, or automatically before an update - always talks to Supervisor’s “partial backup” endpoint. Every time, no exceptions, regardless of what you selected. Supervisor only stamps a backup as full when it’s created through the dedicated full-backup path, which the backup manager never uses. So the distinction is about which door the backup came in through, not what’s inside it.

That also means the label doesn’t gate restoring. Restore works by you choosing the components you want from a backup’s contents, and Home Assistant treats full and partial backups the same way there. A backup that says partial isn’t a backup that will leave part of your system missing.

Here’s what actually tells you a backup is complete:

  • It lists every add-on you have installed - same count, same versions. An old one will look “incomplete” because it honestly predates an add-on you’ve since added.
  • It includes Home Assistant, the database, and the folders you configured (the config/cert store, the shared folder, media). If media showed up in your backups only after you flipped on a toggle, the older ones were genuinely smaller - not mislabeled, just older settings.
  • The add-on and folder counts in the backup match what’s installed now, and the date is recent.

One trap I actually hit: an 80 KB “backup” with zero add-ons that looked like a corrupted run. It wasn’t. It was the fresh state of my new hardware, captured before I restored anything onto it. The giveaway was the instance ID in the backup metadata - it didn’t match every other backup on the system. Corrupted-looking backups are real (missed add-ons, missing folders), but before you delete one, check whether it’s simply a snapshot of a moment when less existed.

Bottom line: judge your backups by their contents, not their sticker. Compare the downloadable list against what’s installed, keep a recent complete one in a second location, and let the partial label live on as the harmless artifact it is.