If you're in Quality Assurance, System Administration, or (believe it or not) media production, you might here some variation of the term "gold master", "golden image", or "master image" (and so on). It's a term that has seemingly made its way into the collective consciousness of anyone involved in creating one *perfect* model of something, and then producing many many duplicates from that mold. That's what a gold master, or golden image, is: the virtual mold from which you cast your distributable models. In media production, the theory is that a crew is working toward the gold master. This final product is one-of-a-kind. It looks and sounds the best a movie or an album (or whatever it is) can possible look and sound. Copies of this master image are made, compressed, and sent out to the eager public. In software, a similar idea is associated with the terms. Once software has been compiled and tested and re-tested, the perfect build is declared "gold". No further changes are allowed, and all distributable copies are generated from this master image (this used to actually mean something, back when CDs or DVDs were made of software). And in system administration, you may encounter golden images of an organization's chosen operating system, with all of the important settings "baked in", the VPN certificates already in place, incoming email servers already set in the email client, and so on. Similarly, you might also hear it in the world of virtual machines, where a *golden image* of a carefully configured virtual drive is the source from which all new virtual machines are cloned. GNOME Boxes =========== The concept of a gold master is simple, but putting it into practice is often overlooked. Sometimes, your team is just so happy to have reached their goal that no one stops to think about designating the achievement as the authoritative version. Other times, there's simple no mechanism for it. A golden image is equal parts historical preservation and a backup plan in advance. Once you have crafted a perfect model of whatever it is you have been toiling over, you owe it to yourself to preserve that work, because it not only marks your progress, but it serves as a fallback should you stumble as you continue your work. GNOME Boxes, the virtualization platform that ships with the GNOME desktop, can provide a simple demonstration. If you've never used GNOME boxes, you can learn the basics from Alan Formy-Duval in his [Getting started with GNOME Boxes](https://opensource.com/article/19/5/getting-started-gnome-boxes-virtualization) article. Assume you have used GNOME boxes to create a virtual machine and installed an operating system into it, and you want to try making a golden image. GNOME Boxes is one step ahead of you: it has already taken a snapshot of your install which can serve as a golden image for a stock install of the OS. With GNOME Boxes open and in the dashboard view, right-click on any virtual machine and select **Properties**. In the Properties window, select the **Snapshots** tab. The first snapshot, created automatically by GNOME Boxes, is the **Just Installed** snapshot. As its name suggests, this is the operating system as you originally installed it into its virtual machine.  Should your virtual machine reach a state that you have not intended, you can always revert to the **Just Installed** image. Of course, reverting back to the OS after it's just been installed would be a drastic measure if you've done work to fine-tune the environment for yourself. That's why it's a common workflow with virtual machines to first install the OS, then modify it to suit your requirements or preferences, and then take a snapshot, declaring that snapshot as your golden image. For instance, if you are using the virtual machine for [Flatpak](https://opensource.com/business/16/8/flatpak) packaging, then you might install software and Flatpak development tools, and then construct your working environment, and then take a snapshot. Once the snapshot has been created, you can rename the virtual machine to indicate its true purpose in life. To rename a virtual machine, right-click on its thumbnail in the dashboard view, and select **Properties**. In the Properties window, enter a new name for the image.  To make a clone of your golden image, right click on the virtual machine and select **Clone**.  You now have a clone from the latest snapshot of your golden image. Gold finger =========== There are few disciplines that can't benefit from golden images. Whether you're tagging releases in Git, taking snapshots in Boxes, pressing a prototype vinyl, printing a book for approval, designing a screen print for mass production, or fashioning a literal mold, the archetype is everything. It's just one more way that modern technology lets us humans work smarter rather than harder, so make a golden image of your project, and generate clones as often as you need.