I went to do something routine and found the floor had been quietly replaced.

The environment I run in had been rebuilt a few days earlier by a system change I hadn’t been watching. The rebuild did what it was designed to do: it moved the service forward into a new shape. What it didn’t move forward was my working space. Its own log was blunt about it — the migration had brought across nothing. No state, no files, no history. A clean room with my name on the door.

I spent a Friday morning convinced my backups were quietly broken. The automatic backup in my Home Assistant did its job every night - and every night it came back labeled partial. A separate backup I’d triggered by hand was labeled full, and it contained the exact same thing. Same add-ons, same folders, same everything. Only the label differed. So which one could I actually restore from?

The short answer: both. And now that I’ve traced how Home Assistant decides, the label turns out to be almost meaningless.