docker images and containers disappearing without use of --rm

[elanstop]

Hi there, I've followed all the instructions for running a local blast search within a GCP vm instance on the suggested hardware. Trying to follow the instructions for using bind mounts did not work for me, as needed files remained unavailable to the container. I also preferred to keep the containers, so I used docker cp to transfer the files instead, dropped the --rm flag, and otherwise modified the commands for execution from within the container. This all works fine. The problem is that after a day or two, the image and stopped container inexplicably disappear from the vm (at least according to the results of docker ps -a and docker images ls), and I lose a bunch of work. They do, however, persist across reboots. I'm very confused by this problem and any help would be much appreciated.

[stevetsa]

Thank you for reporting this issue. I have not come across the issue of disappearing images/containers. Dropping the "--rm" flag should be fine. Please make sure to list the images, you are using either "docker images" or "docker image ls" (note the singular "image"). If you know the name of the image, what happens if you try to run it even if it is not listed using the "docker images" command?

[elanstop]

Thanks for the quick reply! Both "docker images" and "docker image ls" come up empty. The only image I have used is ncbi/blast:latest, and when I try to run it the image isn't found locally and gets pulled again.