Sourdough Snapshot

The backup worked fine until we moved and had a limited Internet connection. We are using LTE (cellular) for our Internet connection and it isn't very fast (about 2mbps). What does that have to do with the Sourdough Snapshot? I wish I knew. Plug in the Sourdough unit and throughput drops to less than dial up. Remove Sourdough and everything goes back to normal. I'm not trying to take snapshots across the Internet, just here locally at the house. The only means of contacting support that I could find on Sourdough's web site was via email. I sent several emails over a period of a week or so and now several months later I've never heard a word from Sourdough. My situation may be very unusual in these broadband days but if anything doesn't work for you, good luck getting a response from these people.

Just updating my earlier review (and problems). Eventually got it working again, but it just stopped backing up again about two weeks ago so system has died on me again and this time - no response from tech support. Also the website seems to have gone down so it's likely that the business has failed. If that's the case - not a good idea to buy one!!Have had this running since Feb 2017 - and it has been working fine, sending confirmation emails periodically. I suddenly realized I hadn't seen an email for a while - checked and the last one was nearly 2 months ago. I checked the app on the computer and it says - "your module is performing integrity checks" - and has been doing this for several hours. I checked the website and it says service unavailable. Looks like either my hard drive or the sourdough box is faulty - and I didn't get a warning message. Very bad. Sourdough Electronics may have closed down. Make sure you check before you buy one.Will try it out with another hard drive, but I'm glad I found it now rather than when I have a computer problem and need to do a restore!!!Update: Tried a different hard drive and it seemed to recognize it and wanted to reformat. So I took the original drive, wiped out the partitions, formatted it and connected it back up. Took about 45 mins to reformat the drive (obviously everything was lost already) and it was ready to go again. I'm not going to risk using a drive that has failed once already so will be getting a new drive - and will be watching it carefully.

Edit... (February 2020) No support and questions are unanswered. I removed these units from my system.The Sourdough Snapshot does what it says it will. I routinely back up my desktop and laptop computers with this unit. The first time will take a little while, but not long. Use a hardwired connection for the first backup. After that you can run 3 backups or more at one time, even over wifi, in no time at all. I tested this unit over the internet, but recommend buying one for each of your locations.Sourdough Snapshot recommends a usb powered drive over a line powered drive. I think this has to do with backups over internet, as I used a line powered 2 terabyte 3.5 inch drive, and all of the in-office backups ran fine. The drive woke up when needed. The manufacturer is correct in their recommendation tho, because if the power fails a line-powered usb drive won't come back on. I also tested with a 4 terabyte 2.5 inch usb powered drive, and everything was flawless.Restoring from a snapshot is easy. Watch their instructional video. Then put your rescue thumb drive in, boot from it, and plug in your snapshot usb drive at the proper time. Very cool and easy.For those running mixed operating systems I guarantee that my backup of a windows 10 drive with a 70 gig Remix OS partition was perfect. Everything was backed up. I even took my mechanical hard drive out and replaced it with a new solid state drive.I highly recommend the Sourdough Snapshot based on price point and performance. It does what I says it will do, and might just rescue you with a good backup.

Hard to beat this Sourdough Snapshot. Easiest quickest backup device I have ever encountered, and I am a home computer user who for decades has taken the time to back up the family and business computers. I went through the simple steps to use Sourdough Snapshot to format the USB hard drive, authenticate on the Sourdough web site, left my computer on for several nights, and verified that I could recover files in just a few quick clicks. This is how backup should be. I agree with Sourdoughs take on what backup should and should not be. Finally something that can do for Windows what Time Machine does for Macs. I've got my backed up data right here at home and am not waiting for everything to go over the Internet connection. Extremely price effective - will not cost me anything more than the hard drive and Sourdough Snapshot. Love it. Will write again if anything unexpected happens.

The Sourdough Snapshot device requires no subscription or payments of any kind. Backups are kept totally on your own hardware.You can apparently set it up to backup to your cloud from what I understand (I have not done this yet).The unit does not use Sourdough servers, therefore it would continue working if the company ceased to exist.The Sourdough backup saved my ass less than a month after I installed it when I had a total hard drive failure on my main computer. I lost no data at all and it even restored the computer manufacturer's restore partition onto the new replacement hard drive.

I've bought a few of these for myself, family, and friends. You'll not find an easier, reliable way of backing up and restoring a system running Windows. The module is compact, power efficient, and looks great. Combined with a reliable USB hard drive, you have a very cheap and simple snapshot solution. Also love the regular mails you can opt into which let you know that it's running fine or calls attention when there's a problem. No ongoing costs involved, just buy the module and a hard disk!