Where your files live

Three places, and the difference between them is what survives what.

Your home folder

Where you land when you open a terminal or the desktop: documents, projects, code, configuration, the things a program writes without being told where.

Each machine has its own. That is deliberate — a home folder shared over a network makes every program that touches many small files crawl, and the programs you use touch thousands of them: a Python environment, a git repository, an editor's index. Keeping it local is what makes them behave like they do on a laptop.

It survives a pause. It goes when the machine goes.

The shared folder

One folder for the whole workspace, and every machine in it sees the same one. This is where models, datasets and finished output belong.

It has no size to choose. You write to it, and what is in it is what you pay for — nothing to provision, nothing to resize, nothing to guess before you have used anything. A machine you attach tomorrow already has your models, because they were never on a machine in the first place.

It reads large files quickly, and reads them from several machines at once. It is a poor place to build a Python environment or check out a repository — put those in your home folder, and keep the big, finished things here.

The shared folder is not on any machine, so deleting a machine does not touch it.

What is installed

When you attach a machine, it starts from a snapshot of your workspace: the programs you installed there and the settings you changed. So a new machine is your machine, not a blank one.

That snapshot is taken when you ask for it, from the workspace, and you can keep several. A machine that is already running is not changed underneath you — it keeps the version it started with, and picks up a newer one the next time it starts.

What survives what

Deleting a workspace ends everything in it, including the address it answered at, and the address does not come back. That is why deleting one asks you to type its name.