# Maximum tag length

**URL:** <https://forums.balena.io/t/maximum-tag-length/368473>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [August 2, 2023, 3:29pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/maximum-tag-length/368473 "2023-08-02T15:29:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![JonWood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9fc29f/32.png) [@JonWood](https://forums.balena.io/u/JonWood)\
**Post date:** [August 2, 2023, 3:29pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/maximum-tag-length/368473/1 "2023-08-02T15:29:19Z")

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I’m looking to have devices report a large, but not ridiculously so, set of data back to balenaCloud via tags, probably in the order of 4KB. This would typically be updated once at provisioning time, and then might be updated a few times a year.

Is this something that’s going to work, or am I going to hit up against field size constraints?

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**Author:** ![rosswesleyporter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bc79bd/32.png) [@rosswesleyporter](https://forums.balena.io/u/rosswesleyporter)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2023, 10:34pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/maximum-tag-length/368473/2 "2023-08-04T22:34:25Z")

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Hi @jonwood,

Can you use a device variable instead of a device tag? [Variables - Balena Documentation](https://docs.balena.io/learn/manage/variables/) reports:

> Values can be up to 1MB (or approximately 1 million characters) in size each. A device will re-download the variables every time the state changes in the API, which may potentially result in a lot of network traffic. The interval can be configured with the BALENA\_SUPERVISOR\_POLL\_INTERVAL configuration variable.

Tags may work too. But customers have successfully used variables for this purpose.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![JonWood](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/9fc29f/32.png) [@JonWood](https://forums.balena.io/u/JonWood)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2023, 9:31pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/maximum-tag-length/368473/4 "2023-08-07T21:31:32Z")

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I specifically don’t want to use a variable because of the extra bandwidth that will be consumed on each state update, these values change infrequently enough, and are far enough away from core functionality that its not worth that tradeoff.