Keyboard shortcuts

Press or to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Snapshots

A snapshot is a reusable checkpoint of a sandbox. It preserves the sandbox’s filesystem and runtime state so that you can later start a new sandbox from the same point instead of rebuilding the environment and rerunning setup work.

  • Templates are stored as snapshots. A template build commits one snapshot; the template ID is an alias that resolves to it.
  • Warm-started sandboxes restore the state of a committed template or snapshot.
  • Running sandboxes can produce new snapshots, capturing their current state for later reuse or branching.

What a Snapshot Preserves

A snapshot preserves:

  • VM state and memory, allowing running processes to continue from the captured point.
  • The root filesystem and its changes.
  • Attached-drive contents and attachment metadata.
  • Mounted-volume contents, mount paths, sizes, and access modes. Starting from the snapshot creates new volumes from the captured contents rather than reusing the source volume identities.
  • CPU, memory, and disk settings, together with command context such as environment variables, working directory, user, and startup commands.

Where to Go Next: