Lifecycle & Persistence

A managed compute instance moves between a handful of states over its life. This page explains what each one means, what’s preserved when you stop an instance, and how idle auto-stop keeps costs down.

Instance status

The status shown next to each instance tells you what it’s doing:

Status	Meaning
Launching	The cloud machine is starting up.
Initializing	The machine booted; first-time setup is running.
Starting services	The editors (Jupyter, code-server, R Server) are coming up.
Running	Ready to use—connect and start working. Compute is billing.
Stopping	The machine is shutting down.
Stopped	Parked. No compute charges; your files are preserved.
Error	Something went wrong starting up (see Troubleshooting).
Pending deletion	You deleted the instance; it’s in the recovery window before removal. See Deleting & restoring.

A fresh launch walks through Launching → Initializing → Starting services → Running, which is why a cold start takes a few minutes.

Stop and start

You control whether an instance is running:

Stop parks the machine. Compute billing ends immediately, and your data volume—notebooks, files, installed packages—is kept intact. Storage continues to bill while stopped (see Compute & storage charges).
Start brings a stopped instance back. A restart is faster than the first launch because setup is already done.

Stop an instance whenever you’re done for a while—there’s no penalty, and nothing is lost.

What persists

Each instance has a data volume mounted at your home directory (/home/gofigr/notebooks). Everything there—notebooks, scripts, data files, and packages you install with pip or install.packages()—survives stop/start.

The only thing that removes the data volume is deleting the instance. As long as the instance exists, your work is safe across any number of stop/start cycles.

Idle auto-stop

So you never pay for a machine you forgot about, instances stop themselves after a period of inactivity. By default the idle window is 60 minutes.

You can adjust this per instance under Auto-shutdown in the launch dialog, or later via the Auto-shutdown… action:

Auto-stop on idle — toggle the behavior on or off.
Idle window (minutes) — how long the instance can sit idle before stopping.

A few rules apply:

Your plan may require auto-stop, in which case you can’t turn it off.
Your plan may cap the idle window at a maximum.
There’s a 5-minute minimum idle window.

Activity in any editor—running cells, editing files—resets the idle timer. If configured, you’ll get a heads-up notification before an idle stop. Nothing is lost when an instance auto-stops; just start it again and your files are waiting.

Other actions

From an instance’s menu you can also:

Restart… — stop and start in one step.
Rename… — change the display name.
Change type… — switch to a different machine type. Stop the instance first.