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I have a production Geth node whose blockchain occupies around ~600 GB. I'm trying to figure out how to free up disk space. I know I can remove the blockchain and start fast sync from scratch, but that will take some time (probably more than a day) and it is not acceptable for a production node that is expected to be up 24/7. I can bring it down but for a couple of hours at the most. So my question is how to reduce blockchain size with a minimal downtime?

I was considering starting a new Geth node in parallel and have it fully sync, and then migrate the keys from the old node to the new one. But is there a better approach?

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  • Is this a private network or a public network?
    – wtk219
    Apr 20, 2018 at 14:35
  • Do you need to check account's historical balances of blocks below lastblock-1000? If not, you can prune the state and release 500GB of historical state entries.
    – Nulik
    Apr 22, 2018 at 21:40

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From Issue #15797

Geth also supports "fast syncing" with itself, which you can use to synchronize an existing chain into a fresh data directory and then swap out the old one with the fresh one:

geth --datadir=/my/temp/datadir copydb --cache=512 /my/main/datadir/geth/chaindata/
rm -rf /my/main/datadir/geth/chaindata/
mv /my/temp/datadir/geth/chaindata /my/main/datadir/geth/
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