I use Samba backup and it runs nightly, fortunately.
I tried to update to the latest HA core the other day, and it failed. Reboot and weird things stop working all over the place. The log showed the recorder and a bunch of other things failed to start. When I looked at the command line, I found that files had apparently been corrupted. My configuration.yaml, all 791 lines of it, was gone, in favor of the stock configuration.yaml file.
I restored from the most recent backup before the trouble began, which was taken Saturday morning (I assume the corruption is why it didn’t run after that). No dice. Friday’s backup got me up and running again, fortunately. I had to re-do a few things I’d changed Friday, but what a relief.
I made the changes again and made a new full backup. I also increased the number of backups to keep from 7 to 10.
Do regular backups, people. Save yourself a lot of headache. I use the Samba option, but there are options to upload to things like cloud storage as well.
Yeah, I have them on an entirely different computer at the moment, but even just a separate drive would work. (In the past, I ran HA on a virtual machine on my server, and the backup was also on the server, on a different drive. Now, it’s running on my desktop machine, with backups still on the server.)