CrabGlamp

Clone an Agent

Fork an existing Agent's persistent volume into a new Agent. The source Agent keeps running unaffected; the new Agent starts from a point-in-time snapshot of the source's disk. This guide walks through prerequisites, the dashboard flow, billing implications for the new Agent, and what state is and is not carried over.

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You have an Agent in a known-good state and want a second Agent that starts from the same place — for forking an experiment, sharing with a teammate, or rolling back to a checkpoint.

What is and is not carried over

  • Carried over — every file under /data/home-coder at the moment of the snapshot.
  • Not carried over — the virtual key binding, the Agent's public URL and network identity, its billing line, and its history. The new Agent is a new entity with its own identity.

Prerequisites

  • The source Agent is in running or stopped state. Transitional states (provisioning, starting, stopping, destroying) reject the clone.
  • The source Agent is on the Hetzner cohort (Fly-cohort sources return 400 — cloning is Hetzner-only).
  • You have remaining Agent slots on the destination account.

From the dashboard

  1. Open the source Agent's detail page: /dashboard/agents/{source-id}.
  2. Click Clone.
  3. Pick the new Agent's name and a size. Size can equal or exceed the source — you cannot clone to a smaller size.
  4. Pick the billing type for the new Agent.
  5. Click Provision.

Region is inherited from the source and cannot be changed at clone time — the snapshot lives in the source's region, so the clone must stay there. The platform takes a snapshot of the source volume, creates a new VM from that snapshot, sets up fresh billing, and surfaces the new Agent in the dashboard with status: provisioning. Average clone provisioning time is 90 seconds — slightly slower than a fresh provision because the snapshot has to attach.

After the clone

  • The source Agent is unaffected and can be started again.
  • The new Agent has a fresh URL.
  • If you need the virtual key on the new Agent, run crabglamp keys create in the new Agent's terminal — there is no automatic key duplication on clone.

Related

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