Copy Geth full node onto external drive then continue syncing

Question

My 1TB internal SSD on my mac doesn't appear to be enough for a full sync with state data. I know I can fast sync but I need full state data. I'm currently on block 5.2million and its at around 900GB so I'm not gonna make it to current blockheight of 7.6million before my internal is full.

I bought an external 4TB SSD and would like to copy my current 900GB of full node data. It's taken almost a week to sync this 900GB so starting over on the external would suck.

I tried copying over the geth chaindata and keystate folders and then running geth with --datadir parameter pointing to the copied data on the external, but it just started resyncing from block 0. Maybe I did something wrong or maybe this just isn't supported?

Appreciate any info on how to do this.

Answer 1

I think we can mount external storage and to set it as ancient data folder

--datadir.ancient value Data directory for ancient chain segments (default = inside chaindata)

ref: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/Command-Line-Options

Answer 2

If you use Geth 1.9.+, Ethereum node --syncmode full contains about 450 GB of data:

sudo du -h ./
4,0K    ./keystore
7,9M    ./geth/nodes
166M    ./geth/ethash
113G    ./geth/chaindata/ancient
450G    ./geth/chaindata
450G    ./geth
450G    ./

Here is the post on official Ethereum blog with some benchmarks

Actually you can download whole chaindata folder and continue to sync. We used this approach while creating set of the nodes (6 nodes) for one of our projects. After creating the set, we decided to create the solution (for free but donations are appreciated), that will help everyone to sync the node

Answer 3

Try to copy the your datadir with rsync command - https://blog.macsales.com/45185-mac-101-learn-the-power-of-rsync-for-backup-remote-archive-systems