Bitcoin QT hard drive space / Dogecoin hashrate wallet

Ah, cryptocurrencies. Fun stuff. If you have any cryptocurrency client installs on your PC, you may have noticed that over time they start to take up quit a bit of space on your hard drive. I have a handful of different wallets, and the total space used is in the dozens of GB. The bad thing about all these clients is that they store your blockchains and other needed bits in your AppData\Roaming folder, if you’re running them on Windows 7+, and you can’t specify a storage directory in the .conf file or during install. I didn’t want all this data to be stored on my SSD due to limited space, so I moved them off to a data drive. It’s much easier to do than you might think and it only requires a few commands run in an elevated command prompt.

Of course, if you already have your client installed and your wallet already has some coin in it don’t forget to backup your wallet before moving data around. You have been warned.

The process:

Install the client, but at the last stage where it offers a checkbox to “Run Bitcoin, ” make sure the checkbox is not checked, and click finish. Make sure the client is totally closed (use task manager if you have to – Bitcoin, for example, might run as bitcoin-qt.exe).
Identify the drive you want the client data moved to; e.g. you have a drive called D: and you want the client data installed in D:\Crypto\Bitcoin
Run an elevated command prompt and do the following:
cd %appdata% – it should show you in C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming, if it doesn’t, go there.
move Bitcoin D:\Crypto\
mklink /D Bitcoin D:\Crypto\Bitcoin
Start your Bitcoin client, you should now see D:\Crypto\Bitcoin filling with data, and if you happen to go to C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Roaming, you’ll see the Bitcoin folder listed as a SYMLINKD.

Enjoy your cryptocurrency.

I’ve done this with all my installs of various cryptos and I also have my backup software pointed at those locations so that all my data is backed up to external drives. Always, always, always backup your wallet.dat to a safe location before messing with the client.