I decided to purchase the Umbrel Home during the Black Friday sale with the intention of setting up a Bitcoin node. After receiving the device, I connected it to my router, created a user account, upgraded to v1.3, installed the Bitcoin Node app, and then… the trouble began.
Initially, the Bitcoin Node app worked fine and started syncing the blockchain. However, after about 30 minutes, the process stalled. I decided to wait a few hours, but nothing changed. Frustrated, I opted to perform a factory reset and start over.
Following the factory reset, I created a user account and reinstalled the Bitcoin Node app. This time, the app wouldn’t even start from the browser. After several device restarts, I was finally able to access the Bitcoin Node app interface, but once again, the blockchain sync stalled after a short while.
At this point, I was extremely frustrated and reached out to Umbrel support via email. It has been over a week, and I still haven’t received a response. I attempted another factory reset, but this time I encountered error messages, which I’ve included below for reference.
From my experience, the Umbrel Home seems far from stable and not ready for mass-market adoption. I have limited technical expertise and purchased this device expecting it to be a foolproof and user-friendly solution for setting up a Bitcoin node. Unfortunately, the reality has been anything but.
I also tried reaching out to Umbrel via X (formerly Twitter), tagging @Umbrel in my posts. Despite them being active and retweeting others, they have not responded to me, which only adds to my frustration.
At the moment, my Umbrel Home is nothing more than an expensive black brick. I’ve emailed support expressing my desire for a refund if they cannot resolve my issues, but even that message has gone unanswered.
If anyone has advice or has experienced something similar, your help would be greatly appreciated!
— below is the error message I got when trying to do a factory reset.
There was an error during reset: Failed to wipe app data: Command failed with exit code 1: find /var/lib/docker -mindepth 1 -delete find: ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff/usr/share/doc/libffi8’: Bad message find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff/usr/share/doc/libffi8’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff/usr/share/doc’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff/usr/share’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff/usr’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814/diff’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2/2c13495e98a86bbd8c8af3fed2045faaaeedbe8d59c91994a4644e3d284e2814’: Directory not empty find: cannot delete ‘/var/lib/docker/overlay2’: Directory not empty