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I am running a full node and I noticed that the amount of disk space it takes is larger than reports online.

I use the command ./geth --syncmode full --rpcapi eth,web3,personal --rpc --rpcaddr 127.0.0.1.

The results from looking at my .ethereum file is as follows:

4.0K    .ethereum/keystore
109G    .ethereum/geth/chaindata/ancient
504G    .ethereum/geth/chaindata
11M .ethereum/geth/nodes
163M    .ethereum/geth/ethash
505G    .ethereum/geth
505G    .ethereum/
Daniel Connelly
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2 Answers2

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There are essentially four modes of operation for geth:

  1. light - in this mode, you sync next to no data locally, instead relying on other full nodes that have agreed to server light peers. It's more or less a proxy node.
  2. fast - this is the default, and you download the current state data without downloading the full block history - once you sync to the current state, all future blocks are downloaded and kept in full. This is what etherscan is reporting.
  3. full - in this mode, you download the entire block history, and then compute the current state trie from it. You only maintain the state trie at the latest block, but keep each block in its entirety - this is the mode you are running in
  4. archival - this mode allows you to not only maintain a full block history, but also a full state history - most people don't need to run at this level, and it takes the most amount of space (~3 TB)
Raghav Sood
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  • Cool! Thanks. I think it is not very clear to call it a "full node" as I don't think that is accurate on etherscan's part. Thanks for listing the different modes. – Daniel Connelly Jan 20 '20 at 05:49
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I wrote to support team at EtherScan.io and they responded:

Thank you for reaching out.

Referring to the chart on our website, kindly take note that the chart is showing the size of a full node on a fast sync mode, which is commonly smaller in size than a full sync mode which is run by the node that you are running.

Kindly refer to this discussion here for more information on the different sync modes and how they work.

I still wonder if this is correct, however, as I only specified syncmode, not that I wanted a "full node with a full-sync mode". If anyone else has heard of this, or has evidence against this, please post in the comments below or as a different answer and I will mark yours as correct.

Daniel Connelly
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