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Software & Backups
Installing onto the NVMe SSD
The official M.2 HAT+ supports direct boot from NVMe — no SD card involved. The proven flow from the reference setup:
- Put the NVMe SSD into a USB adapter (an NVMe/SATA-to-USB enclosure) and connect it to any PC.
- Flash the OS with Raspberry Pi Imager — for this build, choose the Home Assistant OS image for Pi 5. (The reference setup validated the same flow with Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS on Windows 11.)
- Mount the SSD in the M.2 HAT+ and boot.
Before first boot it's also worth enabling RTC battery charging while the disk is still easy to mount — see RTC Backup Battery.
Home Assistant OS, bare-metal
The Pi runs HAOS (Home Assistant OS) directly — deliberately not Home Assistant in a container:
- The Pi is dedicated to this one job, so the flexibility of a container host buys nothing here.
- HAOS is the appliance-style, officially recommended install: it includes the Supervisor, the full add-on store, one-click updates, and built-in backup tooling.
- One less layer (no container runtime, no host OS to maintain) means fewer things to patch and fewer ways to break.
Backup strategy
| What | Value |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Daily |
| Destination | Synology NAS on the home LAN |
| NAS redundancy | RAID6 (survives two simultaneous disk failures) |
HA's built-in backups run daily and are shipped off the Pi to the NAS, so a dead SD card/SSD or a broken update never costs more than a day of history. The RAID6 volume protects the backup archive itself against disk failures in the NAS.
RAID is not a backup
RAID6 protects against disk failure, not against accidental deletion, ransomware, or the NAS itself dying. The HA backup → NAS chain is solid for the Pi; whether the NAS itself needs an off-site copy is a separate (whole-NAS) question outside this project's scope.