Skip to main content
A paused or stopped machine, and every snapshot you save, stays until you delete it. There is no forced TTL and no automatic 7- or 14-day purge of stopped machines.
The exception is the workspace. A workspace that is disabled (its subscription cancelled, or unpaid past the grace period) keeps its machines and snapshots for 30 days, then they are deleted. A workspace you delete has them deleted right away, with no recovery window.
Stored data still counts toward plan limits and billing. The free plan caps stored data at GiB. Paid plans bill every allocated GiB of each machine’s disk, out of the monthly credit first. See Pricing.

​
Set a deadline at create

Both deadlines are optional. For no deadline, omit the field or send 0. The CLI sets deleteAfterSeconds with instabox create --delete-after (a duration). instabox run --timeout sets both from its timeout. The TypeScript SDK takes archiveMs.
Resume does not clear archiveAt. Once the deadline passes, running or not, archiveAt is cleared. A machine that was already paused or stopped at that moment is not archived on a later start.

​
Wait for storage sync

Right after a stop or pause, the newest disk state exists only on the host while it uploads. Until then, storage.synced on GET /v1/machines/{id} is false, and a start may only place the machine on that same host. A snapshot save waits for the upload by itself. To wait for the upload, poll until synced is true. You can also stop or pause the machine again. On a machine that is not synced, the second call uploads at once and returns when the machine is synced.
The upload runs in the background. It takes about ten seconds, plus any wait behind other machines’ uploads, so after many pauses at once it can take minutes. There is no fixed bound.

​
Machines have no region

A machine has no region field, and create does not take one. A region in the body is refused as 400 unknown_field. Placement is the platform’s.

Snapshots

Save a machine once and start new ones from it.

Limits

Machines, disk and snapshots per plan.