Backup and restore¶
Settings › Backup & Restore saves and restores your dashboard configuration. Everything goes to a destination you control — a file, your own Google Drive, or your own Home Assistant.
What a backup contains¶
A backup is a single JSON file holding the way you have arranged the app:
- Rooms, floors and their order, and every room's widgets and configuration.
- Page configurations, custom pages and custom popups.
- Navigation bar order and hidden entries.
- Theme mode and colour, including the custom light and dark schemes.
- Fonts — scale, weight adjustment, family.
- Corner radius, icon pack, icon animation settings, high refresh rate.
- Header configuration: weather, sun, moon, AQI, season and rain entities, clock format, alarm entities.
- Media player names and which are hidden from the media bar.
A backup does not contain credentials. No tokens, no server URLs, no passwords. Restoring one onto a fresh install gives you your dashboard back, and you sign in separately.
Backup names¶
All three destinations share one naming scheme, so a file is identifiable wherever it ends up:
That is HKI7-<app version>-<date>_<time>.json, in your local time zone.
Destinations¶
Writes a JSON file through Android's file picker — to the device, to an SD card, or to any cloud storage provider the picker can see. Restoring reads one back the same way.
This is the destination that needs nothing set up, and the one to use when moving to a new phone.
Backs up to your own Google Drive, in the app's private drive.appdata area. That area is
accessible only to HKI 7 and to you — not to the developer, and not to other apps.
Once enabled, a backup runs daily in the background, and the newest 14 are kept; older ones are pruned automatically. You can also back up on demand, and restore any of the retained backups from a list.
Disable it at any time, and remove the app's access entirely from your Google account settings.
Stores the same backup on your own Home Assistant, through the HKI 7 Cloud component. Nothing leaves your house at all.
This is an addition to Google Drive, never a replacement — both can be enabled at the same time, which is a reasonable thing to do: Drive survives your server dying, and Home Assistant survives you losing the Google account.
Restoring¶
Restore from Settings › Backup & Restore, or during onboarding on a fresh install — see Your first dashboard.
Restoring replaces your current dashboard configuration with the backup's. Connections and profiles are not touched.
Backup could not be read
The file is not an HKI 7 backup, or it is truncated. Check that you picked a
HKI7-*.json file and that it downloaded fully. If it came from Google Drive's web
interface rather than from the app, make sure it was not saved as a shortcut.
Sharing a dashboard with family¶
Backups are a fine way to move your own setup between devices. They are the wrong tool for giving your household a dashboard — that is what family sharing is for. An admin publishes once and everyone pulls it, instead of passing files around and re-restoring after every change.