You should expose the data folder as Volume

[vanthome]

This way the data can survive container re-creation cycles. This is best practice for DBMS as you can see in these examples:

https://github.com/docker-library/elasticsearch/blob/ffaaf3283e47dcb732e90288a58757b87a8439a7/5/Dockerfile#L60

https://github.com/docker-library/postgres/blob/5159417968c6a08e2ed784498cba28f22a74b03e/9.6/Dockerfile#L62

https://github.com/arangodb/arangodb-docker/blob/official/Dockerfile.local#L32

Also it serves documentary purposes because people see which dirs actually contain movement data.

[zippy1981]

@vanthome You can already do that, and I do it in my always encrypted sample here

If you're interested in the mdf files specifically you want /var/opt/mssql/data/.

[vanthome]

@zippy1981 of course you can do that manually but for the mentioned reasons, it's better to predefine this volume in the docker file.

[riker09]

How would I achive the same for the mssql-server-windows-express image?