Saving time/disk space while testing

[carp]

I decided that I wanted to keep a few different wallets, standard stuff, one to keep larger amounts in, a couple for backups of webapps, one for small transactions.

Since I have been switching between two on the same machine, I see that it keeps two entirely separate copies of the block chain, this is not only a space hog, but, means that when I go back to the lesser used wallet, it takes a while to get caught back up.

I was wondering, is there an easy way to switch wallets, but share the block chain information?

[theymos]

You could probably do it if you always run Bitcoin with the -rescan switch.

[Mike Hearn]

You might be able to hard-link the blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat files, but I don't think that's been tested at any point. A shell script to switch around the wallet.dats might work better.

[theymos]

You might be able to hard-link the blk0001.dat and blkindex.dat files, but I don't think that's been tested at any point. A shell script to switch around the wallet.dats might work better.

That's going to cause a lot of problems if you don't run Bitcoin with -rescan all the time.

[Dude65535]

You could save time but not resources by running a second wallet in a virtual machine.

[BitterTea]

I've written a piece of software called WalletBuddy that you may find useful. It's still very beta, but I use it daily (on my home computer and a USB drive) and have not had any major issues. The next thing I'm going to work on is making it much easier to complete the initial set up, but for now if you have any questions, you can post in that thread.