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How can I use ln -s to to make a symlink to the Geth chaindata on an external SD card?

I download the Geth chaindata to an external SD card to relieve the internal hard drive from the hard work.

However, I cannot start Mist when Geth is downloading the chaindata to an external SD card.

Luclu @ Ethereum confirmed that it should be possible to use a symlink to the SD card chaindata to allow Mist to run with this configuration.

What should the ln -s command look like?

OS: Ubuntu 15.10

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  • Note, it will take ages to sync the chain to an sd card, why not getting a small external SSD?
    – q9f
    Jun 3, 2016 at 8:08
  • Actually, that doesn't seem to be the case. It does not seem slow. Could be that the bottleneck is elsewhere than the SD i/o writing speed.
    – Vesa
    Jun 4, 2016 at 10:30

2 Answers 2

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You can either store the whole .ethereum folder or only .etereum/chaindata there

In -s <path to chain on ext drive> ~/.ethereum/chaindata
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  • I tried to do it with only the chaindata but I was not able to start Mist afterwards
    – Vesa
    Jun 3, 2016 at 8:49
  • You would have to remove the old chaindata folder in .ethereum first. have you? Jun 3, 2016 at 8:50
  • ls -lha ~/.ethereum what does it show? Should have a line like: lrwxrwxrwx 1 roland roland 32 apr 25 09:33 chaindata -> /media/roland/SAMSUNG2/chaindata Jun 3, 2016 at 8:52
  • It does have that. But it still didn't work last time I tried.
    – Vesa
    Jun 4, 2016 at 10:32
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Assuming you are using some kind of linux/unix, this might also work for mac osx, but I'm unsure if the syntax is the same.

Mount your external medium:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/sdcard
sudo mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/sdcard

Create a symbolic link for the chaindata:

ln -s /mnt/sdcard ~/.ethereum/chaindata

Note:

  1. This has to be done before the first start of geth.
  2. Whenever you reboot your computer and want to start geth again, make sure the sdcard is mounted!
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  • Why does it have to be done before the first start of Geth? Isn't it enough just to remove any previous chaindata folder and start resyncing?
    – Vesa
    Jun 3, 2016 at 8:50
  • @Vesa yes, deleting the data will do fine.
    – JasoonS
    Aug 27, 2017 at 10:15
  • After symlinking the folder that geth is writing too is out of space even though the symlinked dir has plenty of space, how do you resolve this?
    – foba
    Jan 28, 2021 at 17:56

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