Bitcoin's taking a lot of space on my C drive, and I would like to move it to another drive. I've figured out to do it using symbolic links, but the problem is that my Bitcoin client is currently synchronizing with the network. Is there a way to pause it, so I can move the data and then go back to synchronizing?
My C drive's almost running out of space.
You can create a directory junction (as i did to move the BitCoin data folder), or you can specify a different data folder location:
BitCoin-qt.exe -datadir=d:\BitCoinData
Which will be the long-term solution.
On Windows, the whole %appdata%\Bitcoin directory can be replaced with a symbolic directory link: Make sure the bitcoin client is not running.
Move the %appdata%\Bitcoin directory to its target location (e.g. d:\bitcoinData)
Run the command prompt as root and issue the command
mklink /d "c:\users\<your_user_name_here>\appdata\roaming\bitcoin" "d:\bitcoinData"
OR as answered by @lan Boyd
mklink /d "D:\BitCoinData" "c:\users\<your_user_name_here>\appdata\roaming\bitcoin"
Just shut the client down, move the files, and then start it up again. It will take about a minute or so to figure out where it left off, and then it will resume from there.
On Windows you will have to modify the BitCoin application's shortcut to add the datadir parameter, so that everytime you launch BitCoin it will always use the new data directory:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe" -datadir=d:\BitCoinData
If you're using Armory to manage BitCoin, you need to set the location for the Bitcoin home directory. Go to File > Settings:
