What is the difference between import and load in Docker?

Question

I understand the difference between export (for containers) and save (for images). But at the end of the day the tarball produced by either save or

Answer 1

As a Docker-newbie, I learnt this difference the hard way.

• On one system:

  docker run -it myImage /bin/bash
  

  --> Works fine

• On that same system (using save):

  docker save myImage -o myImage.tar
  

• On second system (using import):

  docker import myImage.tar
  

  --> Works nicely, no issues, just tag required:

  docker tag _the_assigned_tag myImage
  

• On that second system:

  docker run -it myImage /bin/bash
  

  docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:345: starting container process caused "exec: \"/bin/bash\": stat /bin/bash: no such file or directory": unknown.

Looking for that error brought my to all kinds of reasons such as MountFlags="slave", but the real reason turned out to be the one described in this post: I should have used load instead of import. Not knowing what was going on, Docker's error message didn't put me in any sense on track towards the "import" cause, till I stumbled over this post.