Bitcoin Forum

Can I keep a Bitcoin Core wallet in an external hard drive ? If yes do I only need to copy the directories or I can install it in it just like can install for example a game to use in my PC directly from this external hard drive ? How much of a size should I buy the hard drive in order to keep the Bitcoin Core there for at least 10 years, 4 TB ,8 TB or 16 TB (not sure if there are 16 TB external hard drives here) ?

Yes you can. Note that your "wallet.dat" is only a few MB, the full blockchain is close to 200 GB now.

This will depend on your OS, assuming you use Windows, I can't tell you :P

The Bitcoin blockchain grows approximately 1 GB per week, maybe more if you store full SegWit blocks.
I wouldn't assume your hard drive will last 10 years (backup your wallet.dat!), and suggest to just get 1 TB at most. By the time blockchain fills it, new drives will be much cheaper again.

Note that using an external drive in different computers risks exposing your wallet to more malware.

I'm fairly certain you need to copy the directories with the blockchain and put them in the folder the wallet.dat is in if it's windows.

Also if it's windows, I suggest running bitcoin-qt with the -datadir=<YOUR_DATA_DIRECTORY> every time you run it (and keep the drive letter the same to make it easier).

It depends on what exactly you want to store.
If you need access to your Bitcoins then you just need your wallet.dat file as it is what contains your private keys.

If you want to copy the blockchain itself, eg to bootstrap another computer, then you just need to copy the chainstate and blocks folder.

You can move/copy it to any directory you want.
If you are moving the data directory you will have to specify this new directory with a startup command: -datadir="C:\your\path"

Note that in case you want to store the whole blockchain on an external hard drive (which i am assuming because you are asking for the size of the drive), it may be more error-prone to file corruption.
Core needs a continious connection to your hard drive which is easier to achieve with an internal than an external drive.

Anyway.. as LoyceV aready mentioned, 1 TB is definitely enough to store the blockchain until way better drives will be available at half of the current price.

You can keep the current copy including the blocks up to current height, the question is syncing it after 10 years.
1TB is fine, here's the elementary math that may clear things up.

Given this:
Say 1GB(/week) * 52.14(weeks/year)= 52.14GB per year
200GB (current size) + 52.14GB * 10 (years) = 721.4GB Required to fully sync after 10 years.

I second the motion, even a 1TB disk is still future proof up to 15 years given that the Disk survives the Apocalypse and the future systems still supports sATA.

Thank you all for your answers, since all of you are saying 1TB is enough I am taking a 4TB external hard drive because it just costs about 45 EUR more here where I am. I don't see it why it shouldn't support Sata in the long run. Maybe it will continue to grow in number like from Sata3 to Sata4 and so on but it should support it.

I mean you're probably just using a USB drive so the sata bit isn't significant as it has its sata connectors built in.

Make sure you get a drive from a good company also (Seagate is my favourite but others here like WD if you wanted a suggestion).

I believe more in Toshiba than Seagate and WD, not because Toshiba is better if you ask a lot of persons but because of my personal experience with them. I have different mining rigs and the ones with Toshiba SSD starts up faster always and are the ones with less problems. OCZ Trident is my favorite from Toshiba, so surely getting a Toshiba.

Yeah Toshiba is good also their stuff is pretty reliable.

I use a 4 TB WD and start to sync about 10 days ago.  When I start the sync is over 9 years left behind.  Now my progress is 73% and 43 weeks behind with 20 hours online a day.

At the moment I'm using a 256Gb external SSD to store the blockchain and wallet. This is really too small, and there are recommendations that you should only use half the storage for optimum life and performance. The 1Tb that everybody is suggesting would seem to be good for a few years. I wouldn't use an external HDD, I don't think it is as reliable if you are moving around, and it seems to take twice as long to sync as an SSD. You can also move the drive between computers as well by just plugging the drive into an USB port. If you are doing this, you should ensure that each of the installed core programs is the same version.

I'd use this idea with caution. I'd suggest you backup your drive to another drive every week or so.

Also, only use wallets on computers you own and control that aren't likely to be affected by what other people have done on them being logged in (scan the drive regularly for viruses also just in case it picks one up as you move it between computers).

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Your hard drive is quite slow also OP. I'm using a hard drive and it says that the entire install should have been completed in a week (it's on a laptop so I'm not going to leave it on that long - mainly because it crashes).
I should also point out that I have a lot of other programs that are very processor intensive and my processor speed is only about 5GHz (dual core 2.5GHz).

I've got a 2Tb HDD (external ) that I use for backups, and I run another node on a Windows machine with an internal HDD.  The windows machine is an i5, and the Linux machine is a celery :) The celery one is twice the speed of the Windows machine when sync'ing.

Yeah... because all these modern day computers still support IDE right?... oh... wait... ::)

The last twenty years are littered with examples of "standards" that have been surpassed and slowly dropped.