This article outlines recommended practices when working with cloud-based Jupyter Notebooks in Terra. For more information about the capabilities of Terra-based notebooks, explore the Visualization and Statistics section of our support knowledge base. 

1. Avoid losing data by saving output to a Google bucket

A note of caution when deleting cloud environments!  Because output from analysis done in a notebook is stored in the cloud environment, it will disappear when the VM is deleted, unless you explicitly save it to permanent storage. If the current outputs are important and you want to err on the side of caution, you should save them to your local machine before proceeding with cluster re-creation.

If you are not worried about how the outputs will change after an updated cloud environment is implemented, you can re-run the notebook as soon as your cloud environment has been re-created. 

2. Re-create your cluster regularly

We recommend deleting and re-creating Notebook cloud environments every month or two to stay updated.

To keep track of how old your clusters are, you can navigate to the Cloud Environments section of your Terra profile:

To maintain the highest standards of OS security, and to add new features, we regularly update the implementation of the Cloud Environment. Frequent updates means you may run into trouble if a software update affects the type of cloud environment you have set up for their Notebooks. To mitigate potential problems, we recommend deleting and then re-creating cloud environments on a bi-monthly basis. Deleting and re-creating a cloud environment is quick and simple! Just click on the "Cloud Environment" button to open the configuration tab, and click "Delete Environment Options".