If you’re like me, you may have super fast NVMe M.2 solid state drives for your main boot up operating system on your PC but with limited space. It’s great to have a fast booting PC but large applications that quickly fill up any spare space you may have had.
This means any of the applications that are installed, need to be installed on larger and slower hard drives. This is a great compromise, it just takes a bit of management.
This too is the same for Cardano’s full node wallet, Daedalus.
Article Overview
Benefit of Moving Your Daedalus State directory to a Custom Location
By default, Daedalus saves it’s “state” or the copy of the blockchain on your main operating hard drive, taking up all that valuable space. Being able to move your Daedalus node to a custom location means you can also store it on a removable backup drive and reconnect it to a different computer or even a network drive with the node being shared across multiple computers.
Currently at the time of writing this tutorial, Daedalus occupies over 120GB of space.
How To Change the Daedalus State Directory from Your Primary Drive to a State Drive
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a symbolic link of your Daedalus installation and move it to another hard drive where you may have a lot more space to store a synchronised version of the Cardano blockchain.
Follow these steps to easily change the default State directory of Daedalus to a custom location on your Windows PC. This can be done with a new or an existing Daedalus setup that has already been fully synched.
Prerequisites
– Installed Daedalus Mainnet on your computer.
– Administrative access to your computer.
Total time: 27 minutes
Ensure Daedalus is Not Running
If you have started Daedalus, please shut it down and ensure that it isn’t running. Check your PC’s Task Manager to ensure Daedalus is not running.
Locate the Daedalus Mainnet Folder
Navigate to the folder where Daedalus Mainnet is currently installed. By default, this is located in:
C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\
Replace [YourUserName] with your actual login name.
Copy the Daedalus Mainnet Folder
Once you find the Daedalus Mainnet folder, right-click on it and select ‘Copy.’
Paste to the New Drive
Navigate to the drive where you want to move Daedalus Mainnet.
For example, if you’re moving it to the D drive, you would go to D:\.
Right-click in the destination and select ‘Paste.’ This will create a copy of the Daedalus Mainnet folder on the new drive.
Rename the Original Folder
Go back to the original location of the Daedalus Mainnet folder (C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\).
Rename the Daedalus Mainnet folder to Daedalus Mainnet.bak.
This serves as a backup in case you need to revert the changes.
Open Command Prompt
Open a command prompt with administrative privileges.
You can do this by searching for ‘cmd’ in the Start menu, right-clicking on ‘Command Prompt,’ and choosing ‘Run as administrator.’
Navigate to the Roaming Directory
In the command prompt, type the following command and hit Enter:
cd C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\
Again, replace [YourUserName] with your actual user name.
Create a Symbolic Link
While in the Roaming directory, run the following command:
mklink /D "Daedalus Mainnet" "D:\Daedalus Mainnet"
This creates a symbolic link from the original location to the new location on your D drive (or whichever drive you chose).
If you navigate to C:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\ in the File Explorer, you will notice a shortcut icon in the corner of the Daedalus Mainnet folder. This represents that it is a symbolic link to the location that you had defined earlier.
Start Daedalus
Now, start the Daedalus application. Verify that everything is functioning normally.
The application should behave as if it’s still in its original location.
Delete the Backup Folder
After confirming that Daedalus is working correctly from its new location, you can safely delete the Daedalus Mainnet.bak folder from your C drive.
This will free up the space previously occupied by the application.
Success!
Congratulations! You have successfully moved the Daedalus Mainnet application to a different drive on your computer. This process helps in better managing your storage space and keeping your system organized. Remember, it’s always good to have a backup of your data before making such changes to avoid any accidental loss of information.
These steps could be used for network drives, shared drives or backup drives for your Daedalus setup.
This is just an FYI. In a previous step, you state, “Rename the Daedalus Mainnet folder to Daedalus Mainnet.bak.” Afterward, you explained how to create a symbolic link but used the old folder name instead of the “.bak.” you changed it to in the previous step. I know it’s trivial, but I’m assuming some people might get confused.
Great site. Thanks for all the Cardano support!