Snapshots

Snapshots give you a continuous record of your drive's history, captured at regular intervals. If files are ever accidentally deleted or overwritten, you can mount a snapshot from before that change occurred and recover what was lost, without needing to contact support or restore the entire drive.

How It Works

Shade continuously tracks changes made to your drive and records a snapshot at periodic intervals. Each snapshot represents the complete state of the drive at that point in time, along with a record of who made the most recent changes.

Snapshots are available in 5-minute, 15-minute, 30-minute, and 1-hour intervals, and can be browsed across any date range you select. Snapshots are retained for 30 days. Anything older than that is automatically deleted and cannot be recovered.

Accessing Snapshots

Snapshots are found in your drive's settings. In the left sidebar, navigate to the drive you want, open its settings, and select Snapshots. The view lists all recorded snapshots in reverse chronological order, each showing:

• The date and time the snapshot was taken

• The commit hash identifying that state of the drive

• The team member whose changes were most recently recorded at that time

You can filter the list by date range using the Snapshot range pickers at the top, and adjust the sampling interval (5min, 15min, 30min, or 1hr) to control how granularly the snapshots are shown.

Mounting a Snapshot

Shade works by mounting your cloud drives directly to your local filesystem, making them accessible as if they were local folders on your computer. Snapshots work the same way. Clicking Mount Snapshot on any entry mounts that version of the drive to your local machine as a read-only volume.

Once mounted, you can browse the drive exactly as it existed at that moment in time, locate any files that have since been deleted or changed, and copy them back to your current drive or local machine to restore them.

The read-only mount ensures that the snapshot itself cannot be accidentally modified during recovery.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Snapshots are read-only. You cannot edit or delete files through a mounted snapshot — they are strictly for browsing and recovery.

• Snapshot availability depends on your selected interval. Choosing a finer interval (e.g., 5 minutes) will show more snapshots within a given date range.

• If you're trying to recover a specific file, narrow your date range to around the time you believe the file existed to find the right snapshot quickly.

• Snapshots are only retained for 30 days. If a file was deleted more than 30 days ago, it will no longer be recoverable via snapshots.