Hey everyone,
I’m in the middle of switching my Home Assistant setup from Docker to Home Assistant OS running on Proxmox, and I’ve hit a wall that I can’t seem to get past.

The Problem

During the HAOS onboarding screen, when I try to restore my backup (.tar file), I immediately get:

Code

500 Internal Server Error
Server got itself in trouble

I tried:

• Different browsers
• Incognito mode
• Clearing cookies
• Restarting HAOS
• Restarting the VM

Still the same 500 error every time.

Tried the “restore later” method

So I skipped onboarding, created a fresh Home Assistant instance, went to:

Settings → System → Backups → Upload

…and tried uploading the same .tar backup there.

This time I got:

Code

Failed to upload backup

No extra details, no logs, nothing.

What I have

I do have the raw Home Assistant config folder from my old Docker setup:

• configuration.yaml
• automations.yaml
• .storage/
• custom_components/
• www/
• home-assistant_v2.db
• etc.

Basically the entire config/ directory.

What I’m wondering

Since the backup restore keeps failing, I was thinking about manually restoring by:

1. Putting my raw config/ folder onto a USB drive
2. Plugging it into the HAOS VM
3. Using the ha os import command to bring it in

…but I’ve never done a manual USB import before, and I’m not sure if HAOS will accept a raw config folder or if it needs a specific structure.

Has anyone dealt with this?

• Is the 500 error common when restoring Docker → HAOS backups?
• Is manually importing the raw config folder a safe/valid approach?
• Is there a better way to migrate without relying on the .tar backup?

Any advice from people who’ve done this migration would be massively appreciated.

Thanks in advance!