I’m looking into solutions that would allow me to build an auto-scaling solution for canisters based on the current memory utilization of the canister, and part of this solution involves being able to fully clone or partially replicate the data stored in the canister and then to repartition the data…

Also see discussion here: Canister backup - #19 by skilesare This would be great. I know that there is work underway for downloading the current wasm state, but it would also be great if the replica could just copy it and start running it under a different canister id.

Thanks for linking that discussion. [image] Canister backup It is much easier to copy a canister and delete the first half of the data on the first and the second half on the other than to do 4GB/2MB= 2000 intercanister calls to move data from one to another. This clone/copy and delete method…

+1, this would be very useful. Even a feature that lets canister owners download/upload a canister’s state would essentially allow us to clone a canister. Last I checked it was on the roadmap, but I don’t know the current status. @akhilesh.singhania , do you happen to know? Thanks!

From How would Internet Identity handle a denial of service attack? - #10 by faraz.shaikh [image] How would Internet Identity handle a denial of service attack? Consensus: The P2P layer implements fixed-sized i/o queues per replica. So malicious replicas cannot overwhelm other replicas. These qu…

Hi there, we’d also love to clone canisters for an application we’re working on and I wondered if there are any updates on this. I looked into the canister snapshot functionality but as far as I understand it cannot be used for cloning. Have you found any solution to achieve cloning canisters that y…

The ability to download and re-upload a snapshot to a canister is in the works right now

cool, thanks for sharing the info :+1:

Did this ever get done? We want to copy data from one canister into a new one.

It’s still in progress. Cloning data is just one small step in the bigger feature of migrating a canister across subnets. I’ll see if someone can give some estimates…

Hi, you can expect this feature to be released in the coming weeks.

Efficient ways to clone a canister’s data

Developers

michael-weigelt September 12, 2025, 1:17pm 16

Here’s the release announcement:

3 Likes

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Efficient ways to clone a canister’s data

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