I’ve been building and deploying some test canisters in an effort to learn more about Motoko, Rust and the IC. So far I’ve been quite good at keeping track of my canisters.
But what would happen if I lost my files/ backup? Is there a way to search for all canisters that were created by a given principal? I’d love to search my dev principal and check I’ve got a correct list of all the canister’s I’ve created. I know canisters ID’s are stored locally… my question assumes that this local file is lost/ deleted etc.
Each canister maintains its own controller list, so we have canister -> [controller] mapping. But you want the reverse controller -> [canister] mapping, which is not directly offered by the blockchain. IC by design gives each application the choice to decide how they want to store user data, for example, when you go to NNS app and see your ICP balance, it is stored in the ledger canister as a principal -> balance mapping. The IC blockchain by design only stores data for canisters, not users.
So if you are looking for a controller to canister lookup, you have to rely on 3rd party services. ic.rocks used to do this, but it seems no longer actively maintained. There is also https://test.icscan.io you can try, hopefully it will help you with the lookup.