support downloading dag-cbor nodes as CAR files

[yusefnapora]

I'm writing up some docs for nft.storage about how to make a local copy of your NFTs that could potentially be re-provided to the network (as a hedge against link rot, basically).

I was hoping to use IPFS Desktop for the examples, but it doesn't seem to like the dag-cbor nodes that nft.storage uses as its top-level "container" node.

When I try using the menu bar's "Download" command, I get this:

And pasting it into the main search box on the desktop interface gives me

If I click through to the IPLD explorer I can see the json representation and links to the NFT assets:

But sadly I'm not able to download or pin the entire thing, which is what I was hoping to do.

Solution wise, it seems like what I really want is broader support for dag-cbor in Desktop / web ui, but that sounds like a big nest of features and potential features that will take planning and so on 😄.

I think a good short term solution would be to have a "Download as CAR" option on the "This is not a file or directory" screen in addition to the link to IPLD explorer. Clicking the 🚗 button could call out to ipfs dag export and save a .CAR file.

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[yusefnapora]

cc @dchoi27 - this is what I was mentioning earlier about NFT backups with IPFS Desktop.

[lidel]

We have wip PRs in ipfs-webui

• CAR import https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-webui/pull/1838
• CAR export https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-webui/pull/1837

afaik it is blocked by the need to update to the latest ipfs-http-client (https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-webui/pull/1840)

[lidel]

Related Gateway feature – /ipfs/{cid}?format=car – is being implemented in https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/pull/8758