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I'm syncing the Ethereum node for a while now. It almost finished, but I gradually need to delete files, because it'd barely fits my disk. I only have an iMac with a 256 GB SSD and ethereum takes like 75% or so of it :/ Is this normal? Do other people struggle with this or is it just me having a small hard disk? I also have a SD card with 64 GB free, could I transfer it there? I'm also concerned not to lose my 10 ETH.

Thank you in advance!

Jimmy
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  • Parity only requires around 10 GB of disk space. – q9f May 29 '17 at 09:46
  • I second the use of Parity. Also, I would recommend against using most SD cards if for no other reason than, unless you've got a fast one, the syncing process could be rather painful in terms of speed unless you leave the Ethereum client running all the time. – lungj Jun 24 '17 at 14:50

2 Answers2

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You should use --fast option while syncing. The fast sync is really faster and the blockchain data occupies less space on your hard disk because:

Instead of processing the entire blockchain one link at a time, and replay all transactions that ever happened in history, fast syncing downloads the transaction receipts along with the blocks, and pulls an entire recent state database.

But you can't mix both normal and fast sync. Either you download the whole blockchain using fast way (--fast) or the normal way.
See: How can I get a geth node to download the blockchain quickly?

I'm also concerned not to lose my 10 ETH.

You need not worry about your ethers. Just backup your ethereum-wallet. Pay attention: It's always safe to keep backup before making any changes to .ethereum directory

Prashant Prabhakar Singh
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Yes, storing the blockchain takes tens of gigabytes of storage. You don't need to run a full node however if you just want to see your wallet and send Ether. As Prashant said, you can use the --fast flag.

There are alternatives that use drastically less storage. MyEtherWallet.com, and Parity are the two that I recommend.

matthewninja
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