6 ESSENTIAL Beginner's Tips After Installing Home Assistant

What do you consider to be essential to your Home Assistant install!?

Another video series you might consider, as you are a security professional, is how to secure a home automation network. I see no reason that my guests need to access my wifi lightbulbs or be on the same network as them, for example, but they do need to be able to send music to my Amazon echos, or chromecast to my tv. How do we keep all this relatively secure without spending too much (a home firewall, and maybe a cheap managed switch is probably within budget) or pulling your hair out with access rights, and apps not working?

6:27 - Systems monitoring: This gives an argument to enable it, but doesn't ever say how.

These are fantastic things! The interface for a lot of these settings have changed. An update to this video with new settings might be really helpful for new people :)

I am new to Home Assistant, and I found this video to be very helpful. Thank you for putting this video together.

I have been using the auto backup integration from HACs for backups. The below creates a backup of just the specified portions of HA (not a full backup). I also have scripts for a full daily backup and snapshot cleanups that delete any backup over a certain amount of days specified. I do recommend copying them via raynch or some script to another network location. This saves it to the default backups directory. The below runs every 8 hours and you can see the keep days is 9 days. Besides the OS backup it's only backing up the add-ons and folders specified. It keeps it in the format below. Last incremental and full backup. AutoBackup: Sun, 8:00 AM (19/06/2022) Home Assistant, Share, SSL, MariaDB, RPC Shutdown, Taut DailyBackup: Sunday, June 19, 2022 Full backup alias: Perform Auto Backup trigger: - platform: time_pattern hours: /8 action: - service: auto_backup.backup_partial data_template: name: 'AutoBackup: {{ now().strftime(''%a, %-I:%M %p (%d/%m/%Y)'') }}' addons: - core_mariadb - core_rpc_shutdown - a0d7b954_tautulli folders: - homeassistant - share - ssl keep_days: 9 mode: single Daily full backup at 4am alias: Perform Daily Backup trigger: - platform: time at: '04:00:00' condition: - condition: time weekday: - mon - tue - wed - thu - fri - sat - sun before: '00:00:00' after: '00:00:00' action: - service: auto_backup.backup_full data_template: name: 'DailyBackup: {{ now().strftime(''%A, %B %-d, %Y'') }}' keep_days: 9 mode: single Snapshot cleanup: alias: Daily snapshot clean up initial_state: 'on' trigger: - platform: time_pattern minutes: '59' condition: null action: - service: clean_up_snapshots_service.clean_up data: {} I'm not sure how it retains the keep days (possibly Marinade or SQL) but that determines how long they are stored until deleted. The full runs daily, you could easy alter it to run more then once a day or have the partial snapshots run every 4 hours instead of 8. The cleanup runs every 59 minutes.

Great! Sync backups with the cloud is really essencial.For me, other add on absolutely essencial is Samba as well. Another great video, thanks!

Another great video, thank you again 👍🏻

Hi! Thanks for the videos, they are really informative. I want to use home assistant in docker but my understanding is that the supervisor and add-ons are not supported in docker. Is home assistant still worth using without them? All your videos relly heavily on them and i am having trouble integrating HA in my iot stack (with node-red mostly). Any advice?

What LED strip light would you recommend for use with HA? Am looking to install some shelf lighting to highlight my Vinyl collection. Thanks

Thanks for the tips! I'm steadily enabling them. I had a bit of fun with enabling ssh. Your instructions were perfect until we got to "get Putty and just login". I have a Mac so for any other Mac users, you don't need Putty, you just go to the terminal (in launchpad). Where you see the prompt (%) sign, type username@your_ip_address) and return. This is hassio unless you have changed it. Then the password prompt appears with an icon of a key (which I now know means nothing shows when you type in your password). If you're copying it from somewhere else used Edit > Paste as Command+V doesn't work in the terminal. Hit return. You should then be in Home Assistant! (This took me most of one afternoon to figure it out - but proud, oh so proud, I got there in the end!!!) 😂

Very helpful vid - even 2 years old. Thanks for pulling it together...

As an experienced user, I agree with these great tips 👍🏻

Thank you so much.

hi, thanks a lot for these tips. I’m new with HA blue and Conbee 2 but the range is limited and doesn’t cover my house and sometimes the latency is high. what can I do ? thanks for your your response. I use Hue and Tradfri devices.

Hi Lewis, with new HA Green set-up, working through your essentials guides. Have got system monitor integrated, but where to from there? After putting in some code to YAML got a message that System Monitor being withdrawn? The last tip regarding changing the database completely lost me? Is it still relevant? Thanks

Hi Lewis and community. I'm using a RPi 3 64 bit. to build my Home Automation system using HA. I have probably 20 sonoff switches a home cinema and the heating system. Sometimes I feel it struggles a bit. Would you suggest using a different system like a small build pc. Or is the Pi enought. Keep up the good work. Peter

Nice quick and clean list.. THANKS..

Hello, I have raspberry pi4 b with 2GB ram. What you recommend that I should switch to mariaDB or stick to SQlite? I am in the start of setup so I can make decision at this point. But after that when data get large it will be difficult switch. I am confused about the memory usage of MariaDB. As I have only 2GB of ram. Whats your expert advoice for this. Waiting for response. Thanks

The ZeroTier add-on is a must have for me to integrate Home Assistant into my existing ZeroTier environment.