Creating and deleting buckets

Owned by Sean Fleming
Last updated: Oct 05, 2023 by Lachlan Campbell
3 min read

What is a bucket?

Buckets are the basic containers that hold your data. Everything you store in Acacia must be contained in a bucket. You can use buckets to organize your data and control access to your data. Unlike folders, you cannot nest buckets, or put one bucket inside another bucket. You may have a maximum of 1K buckets. Bucket names must follow the rules outlined below.

Client support

The following rules apply for naming buckets in Acacia:

  • Bucket names must be from 3 to 63 characters long.

  • Bucket names can consist only of lowercase letters, numbers, full stops/periods (.) and hyphens (-). Therefore, buckets cannot have: Capital Letters, underscores (_), spaces nor special characters

  • Bucket names must begin and end with a lowercase letter or number.

  • Bucket names must not be formatted as an IP address (for example, 192.168.5.4).

  • Bucket names reside in a single namespace that is shared by all Acacia users. This means that every bucket name must be globally unique. If you try to create a bucket with a name that already belongs to an existing bucket, such as example-bucket, the operation will fail.

Creating a bucket

To create a bucket use the rclone mkdir command:

> rclone mkdir <PROFILE_NAME>:<BUCKET_NAME>

Where: 

  • <PROFILE_NAME> is the name you gave for the storage space (endpoint + account credentials to specific storage) when configuring rclone.
    • Note that colon ( : ) is always needed after the profile name when using rclone
  • <BUCKET_NAME> is the name you want to give your bucket, subject to naming requirements. 



Client Support

  • Bucket names are publicly visible.
  • Do not use user IDs, email addresses or any other personally identifiable information in bucket names. (You can use your project ID, for example: pawsey0234-raw-data)
  • A bucket name can only be assigned during creation. You cannot change the name of an existing bucket. If you want to change a bucket name, create a new bucket with the desired name and move the contents from the old bucket to the new bucket. Delete the old bucket if no longer needed, to free up the name for others' use.

Deleting a bucket

To delete a bucket using rclone, use the rmdir command:

> rclone rmdir <PROFILE_NAME>:<BUCKET_NAME>

Where: 

  • <PROFILE_NAME> is the name you gave for the storage space (endpoint + account credentials to specific storage) when configuring rclone.
    • Note that colon ( : ) is always needed after the profile name when using rclone
  • <BUCKET_NAME> is the name of the bucket you want to remove. 



Client support

By default, the bucket must be empty for the operation to succeed. To remove a bucket that's not empty, you will need to use the rclone purge command, but we recommend to use the purge command with caution as it is powerful and dangerous.


Related pages