Bitcoin QT blockchain location
I had some issues with my computer going tango-uniform. I was going to do a longer write-up, but here is the one-sentence version:
My motherboard died and I had to RMA it back to ASUS, then I spent a couple days figuring out why everything kept rebooting with the replacement motherboard, until I upgraded the firmware on the SSD and now everything is fine.
Okay! That’s out of the way. Here’s what I really wanted to post about:
So I’ve been really into Bitcoin for a few months. I’m not going to try to explain what it is here, because I would not do a better job that the thousand other explanations on the internet. What I am going to explain is how to change the location of the blockchain files to anywhere you want on your computer. This was all done in Windows 7, but I assume other version of Windows will work as well.
By default, when you run the Bitcoin-qt for the first time, it starts downloading the 10GB (as of August 2013) worth of blockchain files into this directory:
C:\Users\edwin\AppData\Roaming\Bitcoin
(It also creates a “wallet.dat” file which is your actual bitcoin wallet.)
This is fine, unless you are like me and have a 60 GB SSD C: drive and a 500 GB E: drive. In order to change this to a directory of your choosing:
- Before you do anything, make backups of your wallet. If you don’t know how to do this, do not proceed.
- Right-click on the bitcoin-qt.exe executable, and go to “Create shortcut”
- Right-click on that shortcut and open the “Properties” menu.
- In the “Target” box in the “Shortcut” tab, it should show the whole file path to the actual executable. Add the following text: “–datadir=E:\Bitcoin\BitcoinData” obviously changing the path to whatever you want to use.
- From now on, to open the Bitcoin-qt application, use that shortcut. The first time you use that option, it will start to download the whole blockchain again. You can either let it run, or copy the blockchain files from the old directory.
So just to confirm, in that “Target:” box, you should see something like this:
C:\Users\edwin\Desktop\bitcoin-0.8.3-win32\bitcoin-qt.exe –datadir=E:\Bitcoin\BitcoinData
If you have a space in your file path, you should put it in quotes, so:
“C:\Users\edwin is nice\Desktop\bitcoin-0.8.3-win32\bitcoin-qt.exe” –datadir=E:\Bitcoin\BitcoinData
This also works for Litecoin-qt, by the way. And make sure you go back and delete the blockchain files, BUT NOT YOUR WALLET.DAT.
