Vercel Sandbox Automatic Persistence, Now in Beta

Vercel Sandbox now offers automatic persistence in beta, which automatically saves filesystem state on shutdown and restores that state on resume. This removes the need for manual snapshot management, making it easier to operate long-lived sandboxes that repeatedly stop and resume.

A sandbox is now identified by its name, filesystem state, and configuration options, while a session is separated out as the compute attached to that state. Automatic persistence manages storage and compute separately: when a sandbox is stopped, the session ends and the filesystem is automatically snapshotted. When it's started again, a new session boots from that snapshot.

In the beta SDK, persistence is enabled by default, and can be turned off between sessions with persistent: false. In that case, the sandbox itself can still be resumed by name, but each session starts with a clean filesystem. Additionally, running a command while in the stopped state causes the SDK to transparently create a new session, and the beta SDK and CLI add methods for lifetime management and session inspection. This feature requires upgrading to the beta SDK and CLI, and is available on all plans.