That's not necessarily a good analogy since you're talking about a COW (copy-on-write) situation, not always, granted, but in this case it seems true. DigitalO

That's not necessarily a good analogy since you're talking about a COW (copy-on-write) situation, not always, granted, but in this case it seems true. DigitalOcean admitted that in some cases they are using qcow, so I wouldn't say I expect the image (e.g. Ubuntu 13.10 x64) to disappear when I hit 'Destroy!' (with the appropriate bits set for secure destruction) but any changes which I have made should certainly be gone. Single Layer: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Riw7y.png http://i.stack.imgur.com/Riw7y.png Multi Layer: http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/_images/docker-filesystems-multilayer.png http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/_images/docker-filesystems-m... In Docker parlance I would not expect the base image to disappear forever, that's a separate layer, but I would expect that were DigitalOcean serving up containers with a 'Scrub Data' option then the contents of my writeable container would be securely erased.