This mini tutorial is for those of you who want to store the blockchain on a different/external hard drive to save space on your Windows PC. With the size of the wallet and blockchain already at over 2gb it may become a problem for some to store this on their computer as it continues to grow. For me personally, I run an SSD drive to boot my pc and don’t want to clog up space with the entire blockchain.
I know there is a tutorial on making the wallet portable but this is a lot simpler to complete if you just want to save hard drive space.
I will simplify this as much as possible so that all can access it. Sorry to those who think it’s a bit basic.
Instructions
Download Daedalus wallet and wait for it to fully sync on your PC. Once fully up to date close this.
Run cmd prompt on your PC -> To do this click the windows icon at the bottom and type “cmd” (without the speech marks). This works in Windows 10. You may have to look up how to do this in other versions.
Next, go to C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming folder on your PC. You should see a folder named ‘Daedalus’. This contains all of your wallet info and blockchain data.
Cut and paste (don’t just copy) the ‘Daedalus’ folder into the next hard drive/flash drive that you want to store it on. For me this was my D:\ drive.
I have a question, tho…
Will the wallet work only with the external memory after setting it up this way?
Meaning that every time you need to open it, you will need to plug in the HDD?
Yeah the wallet requires the full blockchain to open. So you would need whatever HDD/flash drive that you stored the blockchain on to be plugged in before you can open the wallet.
after the whole process, if I install the wallet on a different computer and mklink it again, it will basically be my actual wallet, moved from a side to another, am I right?
Yes, look at my thread here
As LS121, I use a mklink, but I created .bat to quickly create/delete the link.
That means once I connect my flash drive, I use a .bat which create the link, then I can open Daedalus installed on the flash drive, and when I’m finished I use another bat to clean up the link.
Great tip!
Anyway, you don’t need to download the whole blockchain in order to do this. Just start Daedalus and give it the time to create the folder in AppData…just a few percentages of the blockchain are enough. Then proceed with the LS121 guide. Everything works fine for me anyway.
Peace
In windows 10 you can go to “settings - system - storage - change where new content is saved” and set a different drive for all app data storage; for that user… This will create a new “username” folder on that drive, including all the trimmings like AppData. It only works for this case, if you do it before the Daedalus install. But still a handy tip for anyone using an SSD and wanting to save space on the OS drive…
downloaded the latest ver today. noticed like others the daedalus.bat file no longer exists. i created the new link to my SSD for the %APPDATA%\Daedalus dir. reinstalled the new version and launched the cardano-launcer.exe.
it errors out returning can’t find the C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\Daedalus
so why is that with this new version?
error log reports this error too:
[node:ERROR:ThreadId 3] [2018-04-29 21:45:06.87 UTC] C:\Users<username>\AppData\Roaming\Daedalus\Secrets-1.0\secret.key: openFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)
it created “GPUCache” and “LocalStorage” so why can’t it create “Secrets-1.0”?
i removed the junction link, reinstalled Daedalus, and it finally sync’d. but now i got to do a restore. and then get it to run/store to my usb SSD. it’s 2018, no option for user to install/store where ever they need to?, odd.
I’m guessing the “option” in the previous version wasn’t intended as such, or not for ordinary users, I certainly never saw it mentioned officially anywhere. I agree it’s a shame we no longer have it though.
