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Move Bitcoin Folder And Blocks Stored in AppData via Symlinks To New Location

Alright, so the Bitcoin block files are getting quite large and eating up the disk space of my SSD, so I wanted to move them to another drive, here’s a quick walk-through

1. Step Open the explorer by hitting Windows key + E

2. Step Copy and paste this path into the address bar %AppData%\Bitcoin and verify that the large files are in there

3. Step Now go back one level and move the entire folder to another drive

4. Step If you installed a copy of TeraCopy you can use the fast TeraMove command, alternatively select Move here

5. Step Open up an elevated command prompt

6. Step Now copy the address bar from the open explorer to your Bitcoin folder and enter mklink /D "Right-click Paste "D:/path/to/block" (replace path/to/block with your own path and where it says “Right-click Paste” simply do a right-click on the prompt and click Paste or alternatively enter it all manually

7. Step Do not forget the quotes around the paths! Make sure they are valid paths!

8. Step Now fire up Bitcoin to verify that it’s working

It might now say cannot obtain a lock on data directory – make sure not to fire it up too many times or it will throw that error

Don’t try moving block folder ONLY: Does Not Work

If you want to move only the blocks folder, don’t try it. I’ve done that and it doesn’t work, it will try to re-create the block folders. Error message is something like “error locating block, do you want to rebuild the blocks”?