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This article explains how to restore your dev box to a previous state using a snapshot. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your dev box that allow you to revert to a previous state if needed. Microsoft Dev Box automatically takes snapshots of your dev box, ensuring that you have recent restore points available.
Restore your dev box from a snapshot to overcome critical issues, recover lost data, or fix corruption, ensuring minimal downtime and maximum productivity.
You can also use snapshots during the testing phase of a project. If you're testing new code or configurations and something goes wrong, restoring from a snapshot allows you to return to a known good state without losing progress or spending time troubleshooting the issue.
Dev Box automatically takes snapshots, retains them for each dev box, and overwrites the oldest snapshot when necessary. You can restore your dev box to any of the available snapshots.
Prerequisites
| Product | Requirements |
|---|---|
| Microsoft Dev Box | - Access to a dev box in the developer portal |
How does Dev Box manage snapshots?
Microsoft Dev Box helps you recover from critical issues by using snapshots that allow you to revert to a previous state if needed. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your dev box. If something goes wrong, you can restore your dev box to a known good state without losing progress or spending time troubleshooting the issue.
Manual snapshots
Take manual snapshots of your dev box to create restore points before making significant changes to your dev box, such as installing new software or making configuration changes. You can use manual snapshots in addition to the automatic snapshots taken by Microsoft Dev Box.
Automatic snapshots
Microsoft Dev Box automatically takes short snapshots every 12 hours and long snapshots every seven days. It retains snapshots for 28 days on a rotating basis, overwriting the oldest snapshot when necessary.
The retention period includes 10 short snapshots and 4 long snapshots, totaling 14 snapshots over 28 days. Once the maximum number of snapshots is reached, the oldest one is deleted. Short snapshots and long snapshots operate independently.
Take a manual snapshot of your dev box
You can take a manual snapshot of your dev box to create a restore point before making significant changes, such as installing new software or making configuration changes.
This feature is currently in preview. You can try it out by following these steps:
Sign in to the developer portal.
On the dev box that you want to take a snapshot of, select the actions menu, and then select Take snapshot.
Select Take snapshot to confirm.
The dev box tile displays the progress of the snapshot operation in the developer portal, showing the message Taking snapshot.
When the snapshot process is complete, the dev box tile displays the message Snapshot successful.
Restore your dev box from a snapshot
Sign in to the developer portal.
On the dev box that you want to restore, select the actions menu, and then select Restore.
Read the information about the effect of restoring your dev box. The restore process deletes data and apps added since the chosen snapshot. The restore process can take hours. Select Yes, I want to restore this dev box to confirm.
Select the desired restore point from the list of available snapshots. Manual snapshots are listed first, followed by Automatic snapshots. The most recent snapshot is at the top of the list.
Verify that the snapshot you want to restore from is selected, and then select Restore.
You can check the progress of the restore operation on the dev box tile in the developer portal.
When the restoration is complete, you receive an email notification that your dev box is restored and ready to use.