Home Assistant External Data disk: How to move your data to a faster storage?

The Home Assistant Operating System allows you to store most of its data on an external fast storage such as SSD Drive or USB flash drive. That means for example with a Raspberry Pi the boot and main operating system partitions can stay on a SD card as usual, but the Home Assistant Core, Supervisor, Logs & add-ons can go on a fast SSD storage.

This #HomeAssistant #External #Datadisk hybrid scenario is fully supported by Home Assistant and some say it is even more reliable than booting the #HomeAssistant from USB entirely. Of course, it can be much faster than staying with SD card only. In other words you are getting the best of both worlds and everything is official and supported. On top, you can convert your already running Home Assistant installation without losing any data. The procedure that I’m about to show you is very easy and will move your existing data to an external data disk automatically.

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► TIME TABLE
00:00 What actually is Home Assistant External Data Disk?
01:11 What is needed for the Home Assistant External Data Disk?
01:52 Backup First!
02:30 Using UI to move the Home Assistant external data disk
03:57 Using CLI to move the Home Assistant external data disk
06:03 Not enough power?

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[jamesgedney-higham]

Great video just what I was looking for and so much simpler than other methods I have seen! Note to everyone the location to get to the MoveData button has moved to Settings>System>Storage

[MustangBoss]

You must have known I was thinking about moving too an SSD today.
Great timing thanks.

[ChrisS-oofl]

About time someone has finally made a video on this! The datactl move command has always been an available option Ignored by almost everyone! Meanwhile creators and bloggers told everyone they had no choice but to do a completely new instillation with an ssd boot. This supported method was long over due.

[shaunwhiteley]

I'm using the Frigate addon, anyone have any idea how I can add an additional hard drive to home assistant for just the Media share? Thanks

[tomm]

Thank you for this. Liked and subscribed. Specific for what I needed not a combination of "similar" situations.

[saadologue]

The biggest shortcoming of HomeAssistant

[NigelGent]

Just did this the "easy way". After an hour and a half nothing much was happening and still offline so I cycled the power. After a few minutes it did come back up and I've now confirmed it seems to have worked.

[KouroshMaalizadeh]

Very informative video. Thank you. Is there a way to go back to the original boot drive if the new data drive crashes?

[deKruik]

Hello KPeyanski, Thanks for the video. I have a mini pc myself and I tried to install a 500GB SSD but unfortunately I don't see it in home assistant and also not in the Bios. In Ubuntu I see it and I formatted it Ext4 version 1.0. Do you have any idea what I did wrong?

[MustangBoss]

Any idea how to increase the swap file size to free up some memory please?

[leongpeter]

I have move HA data to external disk.
after I reboot my HA...
I type "ha os datadisk list" in terminal
devices: [ ]
disks: [ ]
what's wrong in my HA?
--
when I type "df -a -h"
I can't find my original SD case (64GM, HA system)
only see usb external fast storage (500G),
how can I find my 64G storage?
--
Thank you

[praveenmadhavan]

Thank you for showing this. I'm trying to 'Move Datadisk' to my Seagate 5 TB HDD and even after 8+ hours, Home Assistant doesn't come up. Tried both the UI and CLI methods. I'm having to power cycle my Home Assistant Blue manually and when HA comes back up, the HDD is not recognized. Any idea how to debug this?

[krayzieegg]

where can i find .storage? is it on my drives? is it in my configuration.yaml? or access it on cli? i tried configuration.yaml and there is no folder. trying my drives i cant find any .storage file. im trying to access my home assistant using cloudflare no ports open but everytime i try to login i always get this Error: login blocked: user cannot authenticate remotely

i finally figured it out: people->your account->un ticked can only log in from local network.
thanks you

[David-vxcf]

You continue coming up with very useful videos. Most of my HA implementation is courtesy of you. Thank you. Unfortunately, in this case I am stuck. When I click on the 3 dots, only the Hardware option is shown. This is with the Supervised HA on docker. Everything else (besides the Samba media problem) works fine. Any thoughts?

[johntie]

Great videos, thank you. But I've followed this video. Bought an ssd 120gb. Failed, got a powered usb, still failed... What do i do next? "Failed to move datadisk. Could not format Device '/dev/sda' invalid or not existing. Im running Odroid N2+. Hope you can give me some ideas please?

[HATipsByLarry]

Geat video but you can also boot directly from a SSD to home assistant with a raspberry pi 4 without even having a SD card in the raspberry pi.

[Sonu_sukralia]

Please help me I want to put Home assistant in Micro SD card and my all movies in Hardisk.
I want to access my hardisk using HA OS(SD Card)
Please help me .
I want both SD Card (OS) and hardisk (move)

[johanwolbink]

Super nice video, thanks. But i have run HA in Proxmox and i want to store the record files from Frigate on a USB externel drive. Is that possible with this ?

[dcTuber]

Thanks for the great instruction.
I tried the method of transferring data to SSD. Unfortunately, the procedure did not end (even after 2 hours), so I interrupted it.
Could the problem be if RPi 4 is set to boot from SSD?

[sudheer]

Can u do how to add external hard to media sources, BTW I'm Booting with 128gb SSD and i need to my 4tb HDD to it please help me