Will your agent's work survive the cloud computer?

In October 2026, users of one cloud agent service reported on X that their agents’ computers had been rolled back or reset without warning: files, SSH keys, skills and memory gone, and in one case a week of work. Whatever caused it, the lesson holds for every service: an agent’s work is only as safe as the place it’s stored.

What can be lost, from most fragile to least

1. Running processes. The agent itself, its terminal, dev servers, background jobs. These stop whenever the machine pauses, sleeps, restarts or runs out of credit.
2. Files on the machine’s disk. Your checkout, uncommitted changes, build caches, installed tools. These survive a pause on most services, but not a reset, a rollback to an old snapshot, or deletion.
3. The machine’s setup. SSH keys, agent sign-ins, skills, CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md files, dotfiles. This is the part people forget, and the slowest to rebuild.
4. Work pushed somewhere else. Commits on GitHub survive anything that happens to the machine.

What each kind of machine keeps

	Running processes	Files on disk	The machine
Claude Code cloud sessions	Stop when the VM pauses after a few idle minutes	Kept while paused	Can later be reclaimed; in-flight work is lost and the session restarts on a fresh VM
Docker Cloud Sandboxes	A session runs for up to 24 hours (1 hour by default)	Kept while paused	Paused sandboxes keep their state
Railway free agent VMs	Stop after the 60-minute window unless claimed	Deleted with the VM if it isn’t claimed within 24 hours	Kept once you claim it
boat.dev	Processes you started by hand don’t resume after boat stop	Kept in a snapshot	A stopped sandbox’s snapshot is kept for 14 days
A VPS you run	Stop on reboot unless you set up services	Kept	Yours, until you or the provider removes it
Cube	Keep running until you pause, or credit runs out	Kept on a persistent NVMe disk, also while paused	Yours until you choose Delete computer

These are as of October 2026; the sources are at the end of the page.

Six habits that keep agent work safe anywhere

1. Make the agent commit and push as it goes

The single most useful rule. Put it in the instructions your agent reads:

## Saving work
- Work on a branch, never on main.
- Commit after each step that builds and passes its tests.
- Push the branch after every commit.
- Before a long task, write the plan to PLAN.md and commit it.

With this in CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, a reset costs you minutes, not a week.

2. Give every task its own worktree and branch

A worktree per task keeps parallel agents from overwriting each other, and a pushed branch per task means every agent’s progress is saved separately.

3. Keep the setup in a repository

Agent instructions, skills, shell config and a short setup.sh that installs your tools belong in a dotfiles repository. Then a fresh or replacement machine is ready in minutes. Keep secrets out of it; sign in again instead.

4. Write progress to files, not just to the conversation

Long tasks and loops should record where they are (a checklist in PLAN.md, a progress.json) and commit it. If the process stops, the next run reads the file and continues instead of starting over.

5. Back up what isn’t in Git

Databases, generated assets and anything in .gitignore won’t be on GitHub. Download an archive before any risky change, and always before deleting a machine.

6. Know what stops your agents

Find out what pauses your machine: idle timeouts, session limits, credit running out. A paused agent looks the same as a finished one until you open it. Check the machine’s status before trusting that a task is done.

How Cube handles it

Cube gives your agents their own Linux computer in the cloud with a persistent NVMe disk:

• Closing your laptop or the app never pauses it. Agents keep working in their terminals.
• Pausing keeps the disk. Running processes stop and your files stay, at $2 per vCPU a month. If credit runs out, the computer pauses the same way, and your files wait for you.
• The disk only goes away when you delete it. Delete computer removes the computer and its disk for good, so it’s the one step to take carefully.
• Backups are one click. In Machine, Download files saves your files, or everything on the persistent disk, to your Mac. See Back up your files.

Habits 1 to 4 still apply: Git is the backup that survives any computer, Cube included.