4EVER Pin: Why is Pinning Important?

Published in

4EVERLAND

3 min readMar 13, 2023

On the first day of March, like many members of the community, I was happy to see 4EVERLAND Storage release an important addition, the 4EVER Pin.

I started experimenting with the feature right away and felt that I should post a content about it.

In summary, 4EVER Pin is based on the IPFS Pinning Service, a standardised specification for developers building on IPFS that allows applications to integrate the pinning service without the need to understand the unique API. This is important for project owners who hold bulk cid data.

Why does IPFS need pinning services?

When a piece of data is retrieved in IPFS, the IPFS node stores a local cache of the data, which undoubtedly takes up space on that node. Therefore, IPFS nodes will periodically or frequently clear these caches to avoid running out of storage space, which will result in that content data being cleared. This is an automated process, since you can only guarantee control over your own IPFS node and have no sway over other IPFS network nodes storing your data. If your node is not operational, that content will not be retrievable on the IPFS network.

The presence of Pinning ensures that no matter how many nodes have cached a file, it will always be available on at least one node.

So if you are uploading a file that needs to be accessible for a long time, the IPFS Pinning service can be very helpful in solving these problems.

Pinning Though 4EVER Pin

To pin content to IPFS using 4EVERLAND, first, sign up for a free 4EVERLAND account. Then, log in to the dashboard.

Then select ‘4EVER Pin’, and select ‘Upload’, either ‘ Selected CID’ or ‘Bulk CIDs’ to pin a single CID or multiple CIDs to IPFS.

IPFS Migrator

If you have hundreds or thousands of IPFS CIDs to migrate to 4EVERLAND, re-pin them one by one can be tedious and time consuming.

Using IPFS Migrator is as easy as logging in to the provider you want to migrate to (e.g. Pinata). For details, please find the official tutorial at https://docs.4everland.org/storage/4ever-pin/ipfs-migrator.