Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: halfawake on June 24, 2014, 08:36:01 PM



Title: Moving blockchain to another hard drive?
Post by: halfawake on June 24, 2014, 08:36:01 PM
Has anyone (using Windows) moved the bitcoin-qt blockchain to another hard drive?  I'm wondering how hard it is configuration wise, since I'm planning on doing this eventually since I use Armory and having two blockchains on my computer is more than my (relatively small) hard drive can handle, but I think it's worth it for the extra options that Armory provides.


Title: Re: Moving blockchain to another hard drive?
Post by: grue on June 25, 2014, 01:31:32 AM
bitcoin-qt -datadir=yourlocation

or create a symbolic link from the default data directory to the other hard drive.


Title: Re: Moving blockchain to another hard drive?
Post by: Dare on June 25, 2014, 01:48:32 AM
Using -datadir and moving the files is good if the other hard drive is secure and trustworthy, as it moves everything including your wallet file to the target location.

I personally used added symlinks for just the block and chainstate folders, because I don't completely trust the reliability of the drive I'm storing it on and I'd rather not take the chance of it failing with my wallet on it, however small that may be (yes, I have backups, but still). Adding symbolic links is slightly more involved (unless you've used the command line before, in which case it's just as easy) than editing your bitcoin-qt shortcut though, so unless you have a particular reason to I'd recommend just moving the entire data directory with -datadir.


Title: Re: Moving blockchain to another hard drive?
Post by: Newar on June 25, 2014, 02:16:51 AM

IIRC Armory and QT use the same blockchain data.


Title: Re: Moving blockchain to another hard drive?
Post by: halfawake on June 25, 2014, 03:21:41 AM
bitcoin-qt -datadir=yourlocation

or create a symbolic link from the default data directory to the other hard drive.

Oh, awesome, so it's pretty easy then.  That's good to know.



IIRC Armory and QT use the same blockchain data.

Not anymore, since 0.8.7 Armory has had the Blockchain totally separate.  I believe Armory still requires an install of bitcoin-qt be running, but it has it's own version of the blockchain now.  It's a bit out of date on my computer because I haven't run Armory in a few weeks, but there's definitely a copy of an (old version) of the blockchain.  It's in C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Roaming\Armory\databases if you're using Windows, essentially the same location that bitcoin-qt stores its blockchain.  It's a tradeoff Armory makes between hard drive space and RAM, it used to require 6+ GB of RAM to use, now it just requires O(2N) of the blockchain to use, where N is the size of the blockchain.