hassio-google-drive-backup: the FAQ names four things it cannot do, and the newest release is two and a half years old

The readme has a section titled the upsell, with a template placeholder in it

One heading in this document is literally called the upsell, and it contains an unfilled template variable.

The section says the add-on has been featured by a placeholder reading as your favourite home automation YouTuber, and is often listed as essential when starting with Home Assistant. Two videos are linked below it, from two channels.

The placeholder is the detail. It is the shape a sentence takes before someone edits it, and it is sitting in the published readme of a project with a hundred thousand users, in the second section after the feature list.

That is not a criticism of the project. It is evidence of how the readme is written: the feature list runs to ten bullets, several of them jokes, and the funding appeal immediately below is a list of five donation links with a crypto link repeated three times in a row.

The project says outright that the Drive integration requires financial support while the add-on itself is free. So the readme's business model is stated in the readme, and the section heading tells you what kind of section it is.

The FAQ lists four things it cannot do, and points you somewhere else

The first FAQ entry answers whether the add-on is for you, and the honest version of that answer is a list of exclusions.

It cannot create backups more than once a day. It cannot create backups only when your configuration changes. It cannot upload anywhere other than Google Drive. And it cannot be customised beyond what its settings allow.

Then the recommendation: if you want a backup strategy that is highly customised to your needs, you might be better off building something with Home Assistant automations and a different file-sharing add-on. The readme says the author started by doing exactly that for himself before writing this.

That is worth reading carefully as a user, because it inverts the usual pitch. A project listing four ways you might want to use something else, and naming the alternative, is telling you its scope is a feature.

The same paragraph is also where the human voice comes through most, including a claim of around a hundred thousand users and a joke about community pressure to translate the interface into a language the author did not expect to need.

One number appears in the whole readme, and it is twelve hours

The second FAQ entry asks how you will know the backup is there when you need it, and its premise is worth stating because it is a criticism of the host rather than of the add-on.

Home Assistant is described as notorious for failing silently, and your backups are not something you want to discover are broken after a stray comma stops the lights working.

So the add-on watches its own schedule, and if it falls more than twelve hours behind, you are told in two ways: a notification in the Home Assistant interface, and a binary sensor you can wire to other actions.

Twelve hours is the only quantity in this readme. It is the entire alerting contract: nothing about a missed upload, a failed authentication, or a full quota, just a schedule that has slipped by half a day.

The readme then sums the design as redundancy being the foundation of reliability, with local backups, the Drive copies, and two kinds of notification. It is a small design, and the twelve hours is the whole of it.

Restoring is documented for the case where the disk died

The third FAQ entry covers restore, and it starts by telling you not to worry about it.

The backups the add-on creates are the same backups Home Assistant creates by itself, so they can be restored with any of the methods Home Assistant documents. The add-on is a scheduler and a uploader, not a different backup format.

Then two cases. If you can still reach the add-on's interface, you select the backup and load it back into Home Assistant. If you cannot, and the example given is a failed hard drive with a fresh install, you download one of the backups you previously created from Drive.

The second case is the one that justifies the whole project, and the readme tells you what to do before you need it: the interface shows how many backups exist and what will happen to them once Drive is connected.

What the readme does not cover in the visible text is the step after the download on new hardware, since that paragraph runs out of the document.

The last release is two and a half years older than the last commit

Compare the two dates the repository gives you and the picture is a project that still works on itself.

The most recent commit is dated 2026-07-13. The newest release is v0.112.1, tagged 2023-12-03, with the two before it in June and April of 2023.

So the code has been changing for more than two years after the last tagged build, and this add-on is distributed through a repository descriptor that tells Home Assistant where to fetch versions from. What a user installs from the add-on store is therefore the 2023 code, not the code in this repository.

That distinction matters more here than in most projects. A library that is four versions ahead of its last release is unusual; an add-on that installs into someone's home automation system, where a broken update takes out the automation, is a different risk profile.

The readme does not mention any of this. There is no note about which version the store serves and no changelog pointer in the visible text, so the gap between the two dates is visible only from the repository's own metadata.

A hosting descriptor sits in the root of a Home Assistant add-on

The repository contains a file that has no business in a Home Assistant add-on, and reading it explains why the project says it needs financial support.

There is a Heroku deployment descriptor at the root, and a separate document about running the authentication flow locally. Together they say that the Google Drive sign-in needs an endpoint the hosting provider will accept, which a local network cannot provide.

So the add-on installs locally, but authenticating against Drive routes through something the author runs, unless you bring your own API credentials. The readme offers that second option and warns the process is not simple.

That is the real architectural fact about this project, and it is not stated as an architectural fact. It is stated as a funding request, which is a fair way to say it and a poor way to document it.

A user deciding whether to install this should know that the credential they link their Drive account to passes through a third-party host, and the repository tells them so in a paragraph about donation links.

The crypto donation link appears three times, under a joke about mining bitcoin

The funding block is a list of five links, and the last one is repeated three times in a row.

The first four are the usual platforms, in order: a coffee platform, a payment platform, a membership platform, and the repository's own sponsorship page. The fifth points at a markdown file in the repository about donating in cryptocurrency, and it is listed three times before the block ends.

Three identical entries is a copy-paste artefact rather than a message, and it sits directly below the feature list whose final bullet is a joke about whether the add-on mines bitcoin on your home automation server. The joke says most certainly not, then immediately asks whether it does, and three lines later the readme links to crypto donation instructions.

That sequence is funnier than it is alarming, and the add-on's design does make the joke worth making: a scheduled job with credentials to your backup destination is exactly the sort of thing that invites the question.

The rest of the root is ordinary. A coverage configuration and a test configuration for the Python side, a development container definition, a repository descriptor, the add-on package directory whose name repeats the repository name, an images directory for the screenshots, and a contributor guide.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it if you want Home Assistant backups in Drive without writing automation, and read the FAQ's four exclusions before you decide, because they are real and one of them, more than one backup a day, will not change. Two things to check. The add-on can install in a few clicks but its Drive authentication depends on a component the author hosts, or on your own API credentials, which the readme calls not simple. And the version the add-on store serves is from 2023, not from the code you can see.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. README
4. Releases
5. sabeechen/hassio-google-drive-backup on GitHub