Vercel Drives gives AI agents persistent storage across sandboxes

Keeping files separate from the environment

Vercel says agents often handle complex work that continues across multiple runs. As the work changes, an agent may need a new environment with different tools, runtimes or compute. The company argues that the agent should be able to keep working with the same files when that happens.

Vercel Drives is built for that purpose. A drive is created once and then mounted when a sandbox is created. It can be set up from the CLI with the commands sandbox drives get-or-create agent-workspace and sandbox create --mount agent-workspace:/workspace. The same can be done from the Sandbox SDK, using the Drive and Sandbox classes from @vercel/sandbox.

In Vercel's example, everything under /workspace persists on the drive, while everything else belongs to the sandbox. The agent clones a repository into the mounted path. The next sandbox that mounts the drive finds the repository, and anything else the agent wrote there, where the previous run left it. According to Vercel, an agent can resume work in a new sandbox or switch runtimes without transferring its workspace.

Sharing and forking drives

Other sandboxes can mount the same drive, which allows agents to reuse prepared files. Vercel gives the example of one agent building a dataset on a drive. Other agents can then mount read-only copies to analyze the data or generate reports without rebuilding the dataset. They use the shared files as input and save their results separately.

Agents can also fork a drive to explore different approaches independently. Each fork starts with the contents of the drive and provides its own writable workspace. This lets agents try different transformations of a dataset in parallel without changing the original or affecting one another. Vercel notes that forks do not merge back into the original drive. Forking is also generally available.

Availability and limits

Vercel Drives is generally available for Vercel Sandbox on all plans. Drives default to 1 TiB, or 1 GiB on Hobby, with up to 16 TiB available.

Vercel points to its documentation for configuration, snapshots and limits, and to its changelog for details on what changed at general availability. The company also offers a Vercel Drives guide and a one-click deployable starter template, the Vercel Drives eve agent starter template.

What it means for agent developers

For teams building agents on Vercel Sandbox, the release separates an agent's working files from the environment that runs it. Based on Vercel's description, a long-running task can move between sandboxes configured for different steps without copying its workspace each time. Shared read-only mounts and non-merging forks also give developers a way to run several agents against the same starting data without them interfering with one another.