Copied blockchain from Windows to Linux, redownloading everything again?

unholycactus

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Activity: 1078

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Quote from: Richy_T on August 04, 2015, 02:45:56 PM

I hate when people post problems so I always like to come back when I figure things out.

Just for information, I can confirm that copying the complete blocks directory and the chainstate, the blockchain was not redownloaded and only the blocks between last shutdown to the latest were downloaded.

It does work, but it feels to me that every time I've done something similar (importing my blockchain along with everything else after a reformat or another computer), something goes wrong and my wallet client is corrupted/slow/buggy.
Having unlimited bandwidth and a lot of spare time, I usually prefer doing a clean install.

Richy_T

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Activity: 2576

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1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

I hate when people post problems so I always like to come back when I figure things out.

Just for information, I can confirm that copying the complete blocks directory and the chainstate, the blockchain was not redownloaded and only the blocks between last shutdown to the latest were downloaded.

Richy_T

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 2267

1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

Weird. Was like that for a while on "5 days behind" then I restarted, jumped to "3 days behind" but no network traffic at all also no response on debug console. Then restarted and got stuck on "loading wallet" then rebooted whole computer and it stuck on "Rescan... 100%" for 5 minutes and when it finally started, I was only 5 hours behind and now I'm caught up.

Just plain odd. I appear to be caught up and good now.

Will play more with the copying to Linux tomorrow.

I guess maybe I was actually caught up but the bitcoind part was still busy with something so wasn't updating the GUI or something odd.

Richy_T

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1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

Hmm. Had no inbound ports open for the windows client. Let's see if that helps.

Richy_T

legendary

Activity: 2576

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1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

Opening a file simply for reading should update its access time but not its modify time in linux.

Code:

~/.bitcoin$ stat blocks/blk00001.dat
File: 'blocks/blk00001.dat'
Size: 134174148 Blocks: 262328 IO Block: 4096 regular file
Device: fd05h/64773d Inode: 10493965 Links: 1
Access: (0744/-rwxr--r--) Uid: ( 1000/ rich) Gid: ( 100/ users)
Access: 2015-07-08 22:16:36.913205675 -0500
Modify: 2015-07-08 22:16:33.403205785 -0500
Change: 2015-07-08 22:16:33.403205785 -0500
Birth: -

Richy_T

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1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

Hmm, for some reason on my windows client, it looks like my peers have decided to starve me of data.

achow101

staff

Activity: 3458

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Just writing some code

Quote from: Richy_T on July 08, 2015, 10:42:53 PM

I'm not so sure since those timestamps show the files being modified. Bandwidth was taking a hit too but it's possible that that was just because I quit my client a few days ago.

It's looking like I probably need to copy the whole of the blocks directory and the chainstate directory too. I'll give that a go and see how it works out.

Worst case, I should probably be able to just tell the bitcoind on linux to use my windows node as a peer and get the blocks that way.

The timestamps modify because it is reading from each file and the act of opening and reading a file will modify its timestamp. It needs to read the blk files in order to build the other leveldb files.

Richy_T

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 2267

1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

I'm not so sure since those timestamps show the files being modified. Bandwidth was taking a hit too but it's possible that that was just because I quit my client a few days ago.

It's looking like I probably need to copy the whole of the blocks directory and the chainstate directory too. I'll give that a go and see how it works out.

Worst case, I should probably be able to just tell the bitcoind on linux to use my windows node as a peer and get the blocks that way.

achow101

staff

Activity: 3458

Merit: 6793

Just writing some code

It isn't redownloading, it is reindexing the blockchain. It doesn't take as long to reindex everything. I have run into this problem before. For some reason, Bitcoin Core doesn't recognize the databases from windows and vice versa. Just let it reindex the block chain, it will take considerably less time than a redownload since you already have the raw block files, it just needs to rebuild the databases it uses.

Richy_T

legendary

Activity: 2576

Merit: 2267

1RichyTrEwPYjZSeAYxeiFBNnKC9UjC5k

I have a bitchain-qt (0.10.1) which I have been running on Windows with an (fairly) up-to-date blockchain. I have some dev work I'd like to do on Linux (and for which a new wallet would be a good idea anyway) so I downloaded the latest (0.10.2), ran it to create the directories then copied rev*.dat and blk*.dat to a new directory and symlinked the blocks directory in ~/.bitcoin to that thinking that bitcoind would recognize the files and I could avoid having to redownload everything.

The problem is, it's still redownloading everything. It's even overwriting the files so I know it's not that I have some weird directory thing going on. Did I miss a step?

This is what an ls -lrt looks like when I run it on the directory. It's started redownloading right from the beginning...

Code:

[...]
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 67108864 Jul 3 12:46 blk00244.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 7340032 Jul 3 12:46 rev00244.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 134214302 Jul 8 16:41 blk00000.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 19922944 Jul 8 16:41 rev00000.dat*
drwx------ 2 user1 users 4096 Jul 8 22:16 index/
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 134174148 Jul 8 22:16 blk00001.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 16777216 Jul 8 22:16 rev00001.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 265289728 Jul 8 22:18 rev00002.dat*
-rwxr--r-- 1 user1 users 2097439789 Jul 8 22:18 blk00002.dat*

If I'm just missing a something, could someone point me at a tutorial?

Note that I'm not worried about having to reindex, just don't see the point of burning bandwidth when I already have the data.

Topic: Copied blockchain from Windows to Linux, redownloading everything again? (Read 1389 times)