2025.2: Iterating on backups – Home Assistant
By


Home Assistant 2025.2! ❤️

In the previous release, we overhauled our backup system,
and the response was overwhelming! Tons of suggestions and feature requests
came in, so this release is—once again—focused on backups. Based on this
community feedback, we’ve added loads of improvements, including the first
integrations to store your backups in Google Drive
and Microsoft OneDrive!

This release also brings exciting new features to Voice! Home Assistant can
now call your analog phone, and when dinner is ready, you can broadcast
that message to all voice assistants in your home! But wait… there’s more!

On February 12, 2025, we’re streaming live on YouTube all about Voice:
Voice – Chapter 9! 🎙
Be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you don’t miss it. 🛎

Before diving into the release notes, I also want to give a shoutout to our
friends at ESPHome powering so much of the Home
Assistant ecosystem, including Home Assistant Voice PE! And
on February 19th, they’ll be hosting a
live release party for ESPHome 2025.2! 🎉

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: It is almost Valentine’s day, did you set up some romantic scenes yet? 🌹

Iterating on backups

In the previous release, we fully revamped the entire backup experience
and added many new features to make it easier to use. That release set the
stage for the next iterations and opened up the ability for integrations to
provide locations to store backups.

We’ve received a lot of feedback on the new backup system, which is awesome! ❤️
All the feedback helped us prioritize the most requested features, and other
improvements to the backup system.

This release includes a lot of the most requested improvements and abilities.

Unencrypted backups

The new backup system came with a lot of security improvements, including
encryption of backups. However, as it turns out, many users use these backups
to extract and restore single files or configurations, a use case in which
encryption made things more difficult. In this release we made two changes
to the backup system to address this.

Ability to turn off encryption for specific locations

While our default recommendation remains to encrypt backups, as of this
release, you can turn off encryption on a per location basis. This allows you
to store backups on you local NAS, for example, in an unencrypted format.

Screenshot showing the option to turn off encryption for a specific backup location.
Screenshot showing the backup locations, one location indicates that encryption has been turned off.

There is one exception to this, which is Home Assistant Cloud. Backups
stored in Home Assistant Cloud will always be encrypted, and encryption cannot
be turned off. At Nabu Casa, we take your privacy and security very seriously,
and we never ever want to be able to access your data.

Downloading backups unencrypted

When downloading backups from the Home Assistant interface, you will now always
download the backup in an unencrypted format that can be extracted using your
favorite archive tool.

This works for all backups, regardless of the encryption settings of the
location in which they are stored. For instance, if you download an encrypted
backup from Home Assistant Cloud through the Home Assistant interface,
it will decrypt the backup on the fly while you download it.

Customize the time of your backups

The initial iteration of the backup system scheduled backups to run at 4:45 AM,
but this time wasn’t ideal for everyone. Some, for example, turned off their
network storage during the night, meaning the backup would fail.

This release, we added the ability to customize the time of your backups to your
liking. Additionally, if you choose to make weekly backups, you can now select
the days of the week you want the backup to run.

Screenshot showing the backup configuration options, you can now set your own time and select which days to backup.

Taking backups on an advanced schedule

The above backup time changes not flexible enough for you? Well, you are in luck! In this
release, we added an action (backup.create_automatic) that you can use
to trigger a backup, with your preferred settings, in an automation.

Screenshot showing an automation in the automation editor that is using the new action to create an automated backup.

This allows you to create automated backups on any schedule you like, or even
add conditions and actions around it. For example, you could make an automation
that triggers on a calendar, wakes up your network storage, waits till it is
online, and then starts a backup.

Re-introduction of the backup toggle on update

If you run Home Assistant OS, you get updates for Home Assistant along with
all your add-ons. The update dialog used to have a toggle to create a backup
before updating, which was removed in the previous release.

This change was made because this feature was considered redundant when running
regular automated backups. However, we’ve received a lot of feedback that many
people relied on these backups to ensure they had the latest data, for instance,
if they needed to roll back to a previous version of an add-on. We are
re-introducing this backup on update toggle in this release, but in a smarter
way. 🤓

Backup on updating Home Assistant

When updating Home Assistant, the toggle is now turned off by default and
shows the last time you made a backup. This allows you to decide whether to make
a new backup before updating.

Screenshot showing an Home Assistant Core update dialog, giving the option to make a backup before update.

If you turn the switch on, a full automated backup is created and synced to
your configured locations, before the update is started.

This full sync is done to ensure you have the most recent backup available in
case the update causes issues and you need to restore your system. In the rare
case a Home Assistant update fatally fails and you can’t access the backup page,
if you’ve configured a second backup location, you’ll be able to download it
from there.

Backup on updating add-ons

Things are slightly different when updating add-ons. The toggle exists here too,
and is disabled by default. However, when you enable it, only a backup of your
add-on and its data is created. That way you can keep around the previous
version of the add-on, so you can always roll back to it if needed.

Screenshot showing an Home Assistant add-on update dialog, giving the option to make a backup before update.

To prevent your system from filling up with old add-on backups, we only retain
one backup per add-on, automatically deleting the previous backup whenever
a new one is created. Add-on backups you created manually, of course,
remain untouched and will not be deleted automatically.

Improved filenames for backups

One piece of feedback we’ve seen a lot, is that the filenames created by backups
can be a bit cryptic and hard to understand for humans.

This feedback was fair, as the filename was a hash and originally not designed
to be human-readable. This method was not newly introduced in the last release,
but it was made more apparent with the new backup system and locations.

So, in this release, we’ve improved the filenames of the backups stored on your
backup locations. The filename now includes the date and time the backup was
created, making it easier to understand and identify the backup you are looking
for, even outside of Home Assistant.

New locations

This release also introduces new locations to store your backups. There are new
integrations for Google Drive and
Microsoft OneDrive, and backup support was added to
the Synology DSM integration.

Screenshot showing the backup configuration panel, with all possible backup integrations set up!

Voice

Assist, our private voice assistant, is getting a few new
features in this release. If you don’t have Assist set up yet, check out our
Home Assistant Voice: Preview Edition to get started.

Home Assistant will be able to call your analog phone to tell you a message

Remember our tutorial on turning an analog phone into the
world’s most private voice assistant?
Thanks to Jamin, we now have a way to call
your analog phone from Home Assistant!

You can use assist_satellite.announce
to have Home Assistant call your phone and play a message when someone picks up
the phone.

If you use an LLM as the brains for your voice assistant, you can take this one
step further with the new assist_satellite.start_conversation
action. Instead of playing an announcement, it starts a conversation between
Home Assistant and the user, with Home Assistant saying the first message.
Left the garage door open for 30 minutes? No problem, let Home Assistant call
and ask if they want to close it.

(Starting a conversation with the default conversation agent is a bit more work
and did not make it this release).

New Broadcast intent

You can now broadcast messages to every other voice assistant in your home.
Try it by saying “Broadcast it is time for dinner”.
As always with new intents, support may vary
depending on your language,
but our language leaders are working hard on making sure it will be supported
soon in your language!

Setting Temperature on Thermostat

A few releases ago we introduced an intent to get the current temperature from
a climate device. As of this release, you can also set the target temperature
of your thermostat by voice.

By saying “Set the temperature to 19 degrees” this will smartly target the
area you are in (if you have a thermostat per area, such as thermostatic valves
on your radiators) or the floor you are in (if you only have a central unit).
You can also target specific devices by name if you prefer.

LLMs meet calendars

Without complex custom tooling, LLM-based conversation agents previously could
not fetch events from your calendar. This release changes that. Out of the box,
LLM-based agents can now retrieve today’s and this week’s events from any of
your calendars. Don’t forget to
expose your calendar entities
to enable this functionality.

Shared history between the default conversation agent and its LLM-based fallback

In 2024.12 we introduced a lovely feature
that allowed you to use our fast and local default conversation agent for most
queries while still being able to fall back to a much more powerful LLM-based
agent for more complex queries.

This introduced some interesting behaviors. From a user perspective, it looked
like you were talking to the same assistant, whereas, in reality, nothing was
shared between the two agents. This led to some less-than-optimal scenarios,
such as this one:

Screenshot of missing history in the conversation

The first command is processed locally by our default agent, but the follow-up
request is processed by the LLM-based agent. Since no memory is shared, it does
not understand what device you want to turn off.

Starting with this release, both agents now share the same command history,
helping address this issue.

Screenshot of the new improved behavior

Model Context Protocol

This release adds the Model Context Protocol
to Home Assistant thanks to Allen. Home Assistant can both be an
MCP server and an
MCP client. From the MCP website:

MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools.

To give it a try yourself, check out this client demo.

Integrations

Thanks to our community for keeping pace with the new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more]
and improvements to existing ones! You’re all awesome 🥰

New integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

This release also has a new virtual integration. Virtual integrations are stubs
that are handled by other (existing) integrations to help with findability.
The following virtual integration have been added:

Noteworthy improvements to existing integrations

It is not just new integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] that have been added; existing
integrations are also being constantly improved. Here are some of the noteworthy
changes to existing integrations:

  • A big shoutout to @NoRi2909! He has been reviewing and improving every single
    piece of text we show anywhere in Home Assistant. Thank you for your hard work!
  • Also, @lboue! This hero keeps extending the device support for the Matter
    integration by adding support for more and more devices. Home Assistant is
    close to reaching full Matter 1.4 device support!
  • @chemelli74 added support for the Shelly BLU TRV to the Shelly
    integration. Nice!
  • The HomeWizard Energy integration now supports the
    HomeWizard Plug-In Battery. Awesome work @DCSBL!
  • Thanks to @iprak, the Vesync integration now supports humidifiers!
  • @rytilahti added vacuum support to the TP-Link Smart Home integration. Sweet!
  • The Reolink integration keeps evolving, @starkillerOG added support for baby crying detection as a sensor. Nice!
  • The Bang & Olufsen integration now provides entities allowing you to react
    to physical button presses on all Bang & Olufsen devices. Thanks @mj23000!

Now available to set up from the UI

While most integrationsIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] can be set up directly from the Home Assistant
user interface, some were only available using YAML configuration. We keep moving
more integrations to the UI, making them more accessible for everyone
to set up and use.

The following integration is now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Other noteworthy changes

Bluetooth config panel

The Bluetooth integration now has its own configuration panel! 💙

The panel is accessible by going to Settings > Device & services. Find
and select the Bluetooth integration, and next select Configure.

This new panel gives you access to the Bluetooth integration options and
insights into the connection slot allocations. More importantly,
it has an advertisement monitor!

Selecting Advertisement monitor will open a new panel, where you can see
information about your Bluetooth devices, including the raw advertisement data
and how they are connected to your Home Assistant instance. This includes
which Bluetooth proxy it connects through!

Screenshot of the new advertisement panel

Preparing our graphs for the future

This release includes a major overhaul of every graph we display and show in
Home Assistant. We have entirely replaced the software library that renders
these graphs in the frontend.

You can most definitely tell things have changed, but everything still looks
very similar. The latter was our goal for now, as we wanted the existing
experience to be familiar.

However, this change is a preparation for the future. We have many plans and
ideas for our graphs, and this change was a necessary step to make those plans
possible.

Patch releases

We will also release patch releases for Home Assistant 2025.2 in February.
These patch releases only contain bug fixes. Our goal is to release a patch
release every Friday.

2025.2.1 – February 7

2025.2.2 – February 10

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing
to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be
at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker,
to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more
places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter
to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and
other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

We do our best to avoid making changes to existing functionality that might
unexpectedly impact your Home Assistant installation. Unfortunately, sometimes,
it is inevitable.

We always make sure to document these changes to make the transition as easy as
possible for you. This release has the following backward-incompatible changes:

Ecovacs

The attributes on the vacuum entity for the lifespan of the main brush, side
brush, and filter have been deprecated and are now removed. These attributes
are superseded by dedicated sensor entities.

(@gjohansson-ST – #134492) (documentation)

IMGW-PIB

Some hydrology data is no longer available to Home Assistant users via IMGW-PIB
API and for this reason, the following entities are removed:

  • flood alarm binary sensor
  • flood alarm level sensor
  • flood warning binary sensor
  • flood warning level sensor

(@bieniu – #134668) (documentation)

KNX

The “State Updater” option in the integration settings now works as intended.
Previously, the option wasn’t applied correctly.

  • When disabled: KNX will only read a state_address once when the connection
    is established.
  • When enabled: KNX will also read any state_address if no value has been
    received for one hour.

Please review your integration settings to ensure this option is configured
according to your preferences.

(@farmio – #135611) (documentation)

MQTT

To change the MQTT broker settings, you need to start a reconfiguration.
When CONFIGURE is selected, MQTT shows a “MQTT settings” page with subscribe
and publish tools. The Re-configure MQTT button will be replaced with
an MQTT options page.

The reconfiguration option will only be available from the MQTT integration
entry context menu.

(@jbouwh – #133342) (documentation)

Pentair ScreenLogic

Raw states derived from ScreenLogic enums are now lowercase instead of Title
Case. This change impacts:

  • pH/ORP dosing state sensor entities:
    • Dosing -> dosing
    • Mixing -> mixing
    • Monitoring -> monitoring
  • The preset_mode state attribute for ScreenLogic climate entities, where
    raw states have also been underscored-spaced and had any punctuation removed.

    • Solar -> solar
    • Solar Preferred -> solar_preferred
    • Heater -> heater
    • Don't Change -> dont_change

These changes support the addition of translation keys for text-based entity
states. You should update any references to the above states/preset_modes to
the new, lowercase versions.

(@dieselrabbit – #133866) (documentation)

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about changes and
new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our
developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of
all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2025.2



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