Thanks Achow.  That advice about pruning has worked a treat!  Items in my Blocks folder now down from 149 to 65, and size down from 109.6GB to an incredible 1.4GB.   This despite having reduced my "behind" weeks from 9 to 5 in the meantime.   Much more manageable

This result kind of makes me wonder why so many old blocks. once verified,  need to be stored in the first place.  Why shouldn't that pruning function be built into CORE main program code as a default standard?   Is there perhaps some security advantage in storing all those old blocks.  that I've missed?

Anyway, great stuff!  Thanks again!

I'm just a small investor who started saving in Bitcoin Core in 2013,  and there are only a total of 5 receive transactions and no send showing on my Core wallet. Now using Core v0.13.2.0-g0d71914.

It was all fine for the first couple of years,  but I didn't keep my saved blockchain properly updated and at one point it got corrupted and I had to start it again from scratch.  Earlier this year I'd let it slip again to being 1yr & 35 weeks behind, but am now slowly catching up and am only 13 weeks behind.

My problem now is the ever-increasing size of my blocks folder.  It's recently gone over the 100GB mark and today it's 105.7GB.  Not only that, for safety I now feel I need to keep a backup on a physically seperate device so I'm well on the way to using ¼TB of storage.

Will there be any way to limit the amount of storage required as time goes on?  Will blocks always have to go all the way back to 2013,  or could they in future be based on a more recent reference point?

I've never sold any Bitcoin.  Presumably Core won't allow me to sell any until I've completely caught up on the 13 weeks I'm still behind.   Is that correct?

If possible, would appreciate a bit of background from one of you guys here on how all this works.