Only use these data files IF YOU HAVE AN EMPTY (or no) WALLET. While it "may" be fine to put these in with an existing wallet, and use the -rescan option, the target audience here is new bitcoin installs with an empty wallet.
Who needs this?
- Any first-time user of bitcoin, who wishes to avoid the lengthy block chain download through the p2p network.
Instructions:
- Unzip and copy blk*.dat files into your bitcoin data directory
- Remove any database/log* files from your bitcoin data directory
- Run bitcoin or bitcoind
What this does:
- Resets the bitcoin block database and block database index to the state it was in at the time the snapshot was taken.
- If you have a wallet with unprocessed transactions, the client may not recognize them. Thus, the above warning: Only use these data files IF YOU DO NOT ALREADY HAVE A WALLET.