Bitcoin Forum

I'm looking for a way to back up Bitcoin Core, primarily the block chain and database. I'm using Windows 7. I would like a way that is faster and more convenient than copying folders.

I've tried using Git, but it doesn't seem to work. I suspect it is because Git does not preserve file times.

Any suggestions?

Compress everything into one archive file

Is there a Windows version of rsync? Software that does a full backup once and on subsequent backups only copies over the files that have changed (incremental backup)?

7-Zip works just fine for both backup/rsync and compression. Use the "synchronize" option. To have a successful restore you can only make backups while bitcoind/-qt is shut down.

I doubt that there exist a proper backup utility which would successfully backup both live database engines BerkeleyDB & LevelDB. The BerekelyDB has good crash recovery, so file system snapshot backup tend to work nearly always. But LevelDB is an more of an educational toy and it rarely properly recovers from snapshot backups.

BerkeleyDB has a proper live backup utility, but it has to be built exactly like the bitcoind (using the very complex mingw&gitian build process) to be willing to work with a live instance of bitcoind.

That's useful to know, I didn't know about that. It makes it much easier to backup files and compress them.