Snapshots

Corellium upgraded its bare metal cloud servers on September 9, 2023. However, as part of this update, certain snapshots created prior to August 30 (specifically, live snapshots for iPhone XS and later) will no longer work as of December 1, 2023. For more information, please contact our Support team.

What are Snapshots?

Snapshots give you the ability to save the state of a device and then restore or clone that state at a moment’s notice. Save valuable setup time by instantly returning to a previously saved state, creating clones to run multiple tests from the same starting environment, or providing all students in a virtual classroom an identical starting VM.

In comparison to recreating a test environment on a real device, Snapshots can significantly reduce the time to reproduce bugs or repeat tests. You can take up to 5 snapshots per virtual device.

Every virtual device automatically captures a new snapshot right after the initial creation, providing a quick and easy way to revert to that fresh image. You can take up to five snapshots per virtual device.

Live Snapshots vs. Standard Snapshots

Live snapshots include the state of the virtual device's RAM. Corellium can resume live snapshots in the same state when it was suspended, such as running apps. You can only take live snapshots when the device is powered on.

Standard snapshots only include the state of the storage. Standard snapshots have to boot the device back up when powered on. You can take standard snapshots when the device is powered off.

Take a Snapshot

This tutorial will demonstrate Snapshots by creating and restoring them.

1. Go to the device created in the Quickstart for iOS tutorial.

2. Power down the device by clicking the power symbol.

3. Take a snapshot by opening the Snapshot menu and then clicking "Take new snapshot".

4. Now we have saved a snapshot let's break the device. Click on CONSOLE.

5. Power the device back on by clicking the power button.

6. In the Console, push return to display sh-5.0 #, type rm -rf /etc, then push return again.

7. Now restart the device.

8. The device will fail to boot, and the console will periodically display wdog restart. This will validate the device is broken as it cannot log in normally.

Restore a Snapshot

1. Now we are going to restore the snapshot. Go back to the Snapshots page.

2. Click "RESTORE" next to "Snapshot #1". The device will be restored. You will be able to validate the device is working by booting up to the home screen as usual.

Clone a Snapshot

To clone a snapshot into a new device, simply go to your desired snapshot and press the "Clone" button. If you're an Enterprise customer, this will prompt you to select a project in which to create the new device.

When you clone a snapshot, the device filesystem is copied to the new device, but the RAM state is not. This means that the new device will boot up as if it were power-cycled, but with the filesystem state of the snapshot.

Other Notes

We are aware of an issue when taking live snapshots on Android devices where the web interface may go blank. If this occurs, please refresh the page. We are working on a fix for this issue.