Moving blockchain to another hard drive?

halfawake

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Quote from: grue on June 24, 2014, 09:31:32 PM

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.

Quote from: Newar on June 24, 2014, 10:16:51 PM

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 It's a bit out of date on my computer because I haven't run Armory in a few weeks, but there's definitely a copy of an (old version) of the blockchain.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.

Newar

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https://gliph.me/hUF

IIRC Armory and QT use the same blockchain data.

Dare

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Techwolf on #bitcoin and Reddit

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.

grue

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bitcoin-qt -datadir=yourlocation

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

halfawake

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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.

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