Is this a good practice to create a new canister if the old one's storage is full?

Developers
1 
try {
  switch current_archive {
    case null throw Error.reject("No archive canisters");
    case (?archive) await archive.save(data);
  }
} catch e {
  // whatever the error (storage full?), just create a new canister
  // because the data insertion must happen no matter what
  Cycles.add(1_000_000_000_000);
  let new_archive = await Archive.Canister(data);
  current_archive := ?new_archive;
}
2

If the archive is truly full then yes this is fine. But I would suggest that you don’t just blindly create new archives if any error happens. I would rather suggest that your save function in the archive can return ArchiveFullError and only in that case you actually create a new archive. Since you create the archive with ‘only’ 1T cycles I would guess that the most likely reason for storing to fail would be that the archive runs out of cycles and gets frozen

1 Like
3

Yea I would like to create a #Err(#InsufficientStorage) but as per our previous convo, there’s no such way to figure out how much % of the storage is being used if I don’t hardcode the limit. So above is just me trying to design a flow without the knowledge of canister’s max storage limit. Let me know if this is a fool’s errand or hardcoding the limit is just better.

I see. Yea the 1T is just an example as I’m developing on local env, but thanks for the heads up. Tho even if I created the old canister with 5T for example, soon when it runs out of cycles or frozen, I will still need to create a new canister to store the new data, because like i said above, the data insertion must not be stopped no matter what.

4

I think so, at least for now. I would hard-code 350GiB for now and if you get even remotely close to that limit then you start thinking about it again

1 Like