Migrating Home Assistant from SD Card to SSD with MariaDB Recorder

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently been working on optimizing my Home Assistant setup on a Raspberry Pi 5. Initially, I was running everything from an SD card, which worked fine at first, but I wanted to future-proof the setup and avoid SD card wear – especially because I’m using MariaDB as the recorder database, which generates frequent disk writes.

Here’s the general process I followed:

My Migration Steps

I had MariaDB set up and running on the SD card, and it was working correctly with the recorder integration.
Before migrating to SSD, I disabled the recorder by commenting it out in configuration.yaml.
I created a full backup via the Home Assistant GUI (Supervisor → Backups).
I shut down the Pi and physically moved the installation to a new SSD setup.
I flashed the SSD, configured it to boot, and then restored the backup from the previous SD card system.
After confirming everything was running, I re-enabled the recorder integration and restarted Home Assistant.

However, since this migration, the recorder no longer seems to be working properly. Home Assistant boots, and I can log into the interface, but no new data appears to be written to MariaDB. Logbook and history stay empty.

I verified that the database itself is reachable – I can log into MariaDB and see the tables (like states, events, recorder_runs, etc.). But it looks like no new entries are being written.

Things I’ve Tried So Far

Confirmed MariaDB is running and accepting connections.
Verified that the database still contains the correct tables (nothing missing or corrupt).
Re-checked the db_url entry in configuration.yaml.
Increased logging to debug level.
Checked if recorder_runs shows new sessions being logged (it doesn’t).
Ran manual purging via Developer Tools (→ Services → recorder.purge_entities) to test write access.
Set db_max_retries and db_retry_wait in the recorder config.
Ensured the Home Assistant container has access to the database host.
Checked permissions on the MariaDB user (full access to the DB).

Logs (Excerpts)

txt

KopierenBearbeiten

2025-03-21 14:21:03.942 WARNING (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder.db_schema_update] Database is not the expected schema version
2025-03-21 14:21:03.944 ERROR (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder.util] Error during connection setup to mysql://homeassistant:password@mariadb/homeassistant?charset=utf8mb4: (MySQLdb._exceptions.OperationalError) (1049, "Unknown database 'homeassistant'")
2025-03-21 14:21:03.945 ERROR (Recorder) [homeassistant.components.recorder] The recorder could not start, please check the log and ensure your database is setup correctly and reachable

I’m looking for any advice or tips on what I might have missed or misconfigured. Is there anything I need to “reset” after restoring a backup and re-enabling the recorder on a new setup? Or could it be a schema issue due to the migration?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Cheers,
Matthias

1 post - 1 participant

Read full topic