Hey everyone.
I'm looking to set up a bitcoin core node and I need to download about 600 gigs of data.
I'm kinda confused about this limiting and the restore backups part for 6 days.
Can someone explain that to me?
Thanks a lot!
If you check "limit blockchain storage to...", you will run a pruned node which means that you won't store the entire blockchain in your hard drive.
A pruned node keeps the latest blocks and removes the old blocks over time.
It may worth mentioning that you will still have to download the entire blockchain even if you run a pruned node.
Also note that in the case you run a pruned node, you will have to redownload the blockchain, whenever you want to import a new wallet.dat file and you need to reindex or rescan the blockchain.
If you don't enable pruning, you will have to keep the entire blockchain. The current size of blockchain is around 600 GB and it will grow over time.
Yes, you can change the prune limit.
Again, if you run a pruned node, you will have to redownload the blockchain whenever you want to import a new wallet.
I will enable prun. You said that the whole blockchain should be downloaded. But I don't have 600 gigs of space. Does that mean I can't even use pruned? Because I don't have 600 gigs of free space on my computer.
You will be able to download the blockchain and run your node.
As I already said, you don't keep the entire blockchain if you run a prune node. Therefore, you don't need to worry about the storage size if you are going to enable pruning. You download the new blocks and at the same time, old blocks are removed from your hard drive.
Thank you very much
When I activate the limit and it is set to 2 GB, it seems that 12 GB will be saved. Not 600. It is true?
But still, I don't understand that I don't have 600 gigs of space, where is the downloaded 600 gigs saved! UPDATE: I realized. The blockchain will be downloaded and removed from the hard drive at the same time, and the amount of 12 gigs will remain.
And one more question. Does the pruned node do the same thing that full does? I want to know if what I am doing is valuable or not.
If you set the prune limit to 2 GB, you keep 2 GB of data from the blockchain and the UTXO set which should be around 11 GB in size as of now.
Almost true. Just note that you keep 2 GB of data from the blocks, not more.
Even if you run a pruned node, you still validate transactions and blocks and help the network to be more decentralized.
As I already said, the downside is that you will have to redownload the blockchain if you want to import a new wallet.
No one actually answered this so:
What it means is; if you've created a backup wallet.dat 6days ago (approx), you can still restore it to you Bitcoin Core with 2GB pruned blockchain.
Any older backups will require you to rescan blocks that are already pruned so it will not work without downloading the blockchain from start.
(you'll be prompted to -reindex if you try to load/restore an old backup)
So if you intended to restore an old wallet later, it'll just be a waste of time.
If you want to do that, load the wallet before starting to download the blockchain.
If there's no wallet.dat to restore, then it's good.
It's also worth to mention size of UTXO usually grow slowly over time, with exception of Ordinal boom which double it within a year.
Mostly same, but pruned node only share 288 most recent blocks to other nodes, no matter size of recent blocks a prune node store. IIRC this behavior is intended to prevent node fingerprinting.
When you run a pruned node, the node is downloading each block and after it verifies the transactions in a block, it discards the block and keeps only the unspent transaction outputs on the disk. That's how it's able to keep the disk space really small. So you can't use the Bitcoin CLI to fetch blocks (except for the most recent <N> blocks). Otherwise a pruned node can do everything else a full node can.