Should you remove / unpin unused files?

Questions
1

Hi,
Great job, y’all! I’m very new to IPFS and so I test a lot here and there…
But I also think a lot about sustainability and obviously space is always limited (even when distributed). So I was wondering if there are any good practices to tell Infura / IPFS “this file is no longer needed and can be garbage-collected if necessary”?

2

Hi @asdf_sda and welcome to Infura Community!

If the file wasn’t previously pinned, on a free plan garbage collect by itself.

I hope that helps!

3

It does help, at least it calms my conscience a little.
Because I only ‘added’ files, using the JS http client btw, and didn’t explicitly pin them (which I don’t think is even possible without a paid plan (?)) So, in theory it should just garbage collect itself within the next months or so…?

And for the record, I don’t really mind about the files. It’s just that they’re dead and take up space. I thought it might be more efficient and sustainable to explicitly say “rm this file asap, to make garbagecolloctors job easier…” ¯_(ツ)_/¯

4

Hey @asdf_sda - one thing to keep in mind is that with our updated IPFS offering, the files do automatically pin themselves. If you’d like, you can unpin them by using pin_rm, located here in our docs.