Question

Does revoking read permission on off-chain stream item delete the off-chain content from the node?

Answer 1

No, it does not, but it prevents any additional items (whether new or old) being retrieved by the node. We don't delete it because this would be fake security – the end-user application could already have copied the data elsewhere.

Comments

Actually I am thinking along the line of off-chain records archival and how to free up of long term storage space if records are no longer relevant for audit. To remove the unused off-chain records, is it just a matter of deleting the file directly from the off-chain folder?

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In MultiChain Enterprise, you can use this command to purge all of the items retrieved from a stream without unsubscribing: purgestreamitems <stream> all

In either edition, you can use the unsubscribe command with purge=true

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Note that if you fully unsubscribe, then resubscribing will require a blockchain rescan which can be slow.

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I get it now. Thanks for the answers. It seems like one really need to deep dive and think through the specifics in order to appreciate the features in the enterprise version.

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No problem, glad that's solved.