Where to place Bitcoin bootstrap.dat

Question

I'm sure this has been asked many times before, but I've recently gotten into the whole cryptocurrency thing starting with Dogecoin, and I now want to use Bitcoin as well. I am on Windows 7. I found out the hard way that downloading the blockchain through bitcoin-qt takes forever, so I went to https://bitcoin.org/bin/blockchain/ and downloaded the torrent rather than waiting ages. I now have bootstrap.dat ready, but I don't know where to put it. I have two storage drives - a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive. Because of the SSDs small size and the amount of small writes that bitcoin will do I opted to store the client and blockchain on my HDD. According to https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory I need to place the file at %appdata%\Bitcoin. Since appdata is located on the C drive, there is no bitcoin directory there. The rest of that article is for other operating systems.

Where should I place the bootstrap.dat file?

Answer 1

From what you said, I'm assuming you're using an option like this when you run Bitcoin Core (bitcoin-qt):

-datadir=D:\BitCoinData

(if not, you should do something like that to specify that the blockchain will be on your 1TB HDD; otherwise, it's only the small client, and not the large and oft-updated blockchain, that resides on your HDD)

In this example, you would move bootstrap.dat to D:\BitCoinData\bootstrap.dat. Move the file there while Bitcoin Core is turned off. Next time you start Bitcoin Core, it will verify and use this file to build its databases before synchronizing the remainder over the network.

Answer 2

At this writing the bitcoin core wallet prompts you where to save the blockchain data; you can copy bootstrap.dat into that directory and it will load it from there.

Answer 3

You can simply create a folder in %appdata% called 'Bitcoin' and place the bootstrap.dat file right in there, or start Bitcoin, close it, and the folder will be there :)

Once you have copied bootstrap.dat you can open Bitcoin (again). After completing, Bitcoin will rename bootstrap.dat to bootstrap.dat.old at which point it can be deleted.

Answer 4

i didn't have to place the bootstrap file anywhere specific -- instead, i indicated it with the loadblock option:

\path\to\bitcoin-core\bitcoin-qt.exe --loadblock=\path\to\bootstrap.dat

Answer 5

Yes, confirmed - copy to C:\%userprofile%\Appdata\Bitcoin\

Relaunch the Bitcoin client. In bottom left, it will say "importing blocks from disk..."