Hi all slightly confused when looking this up in the documen

Question

Hi all slightly confused when looking this up in the documentation I have asked this question before but came up with no luck Is there any roadmap intention for prefect 2 to allow the the manual naming of cache file names similar to older prefect versions target argument The current solution of using hashed file names doesn t seem that useful when it comes to archiving data

Christopher Boyd · Answer

Hi Ravi Hashes aren t generally meant for archiving data that would be for you in code to generally decide The results are meant for state based decisions on whether or not a task should be re run based on the hash of the cache as computed by the input function

Christopher Boyd · Answer

The idea is if your inputs and your code don t change on a function you are cacheing then the results don t change and you don t need to re compute it

Christopher Boyd · Answer

If you have some computed result in your code like a model or file or writing a table that would generally be for you to decide how you want to save it

Ravi · Answer

so if I wanted to store results for any other reason then I would have to manually make processes flows with the intent of storing that data

Ravi · Answer

although that makes some sense it does feel like that can be a bit waistful in terms of storage

Christopher Boyd · Answer

yes

Christopher Boyd · Answer

if you wanted to download a file for some purpose we can hash the input and code to decide whether or not to re download the file but what you want to do with it is up to you

Christopher Boyd · Answer

and where it goes

Deceivious · Answer

If you are have the task run id you can always use the API to get the filename generated using hash< Ravi>

Ravi · Answer

Thanks I am somewhat aware of this from looking at retrieval of results from flow runs so was under the understanding that the same would apply to tasks I think that the naming convension of file names between prefect 1 s target and prefect 2 s hashes is just a bit of a big jump in what users are used to

Ravi · Answer

I think the main issue I have is if my prefect db gets corrupted how can I retrieve previous flow run data because from the sounds of it everything would have to re run from scratch

Deceivious · Answer

It seems that while calling task theres a `return state` param or something similar which also has the storage id name

Deceivious · Answer

Unsure about the data corruption if u are hosting the server you can use postgres database and backups are on ur end Unsure about the prefect cloud as well havnt read the fine prints myself smile

Brad · Answer

Hey team I m also wondering about this I m aware I can use prefect to retrieve the paths but this limits the use for downstream consumers of the data I d like to generate data and persist to storage s3 etc in a more structured form Is there any reason we couldn t have the <https docs v1 prefect io core concepts persistence html output caching based on a file target|target> concept back in an optional way

Brad · Answer

I d also be willing to contribute the change

Brad · Answer

And just to be more concrete I d like to be able to set the `key` variable in `PersistedResult create` that then gets passed through to the `storage block`