Node Data Snapshots

Before you start running a node, you must first sync with the network. This means your node needs to download all the headers and blocks that other nodes in the network already have. You can speed up this process by downloading the latest data snapshots from a public S3 bucket.

Here are the available snapshots directories based on node type and network. Please note that the snapshots are updated every 12 hours.

Node Type and Network	S3 Path
RPC testnet	s3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/latest
RPC mainnet	s3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/rpc/latest
Archival testnet	s3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/archive/latest
Archival mainnet	s3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/archive/latest

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If you've initialized the working directory for your node without passing in a preferred location, the default working directory for your node is ~/.near. It is recommended that you wget and untar into a data folder under ~/.near/. The new ~/.near/data is where your node will store historical states and write its state. To use the default location, run the following commands.

First, please install AWS CLI:

$ sudo apt-get install awscli -y

Then, download the snapshot using the AWS CLI:

$ chain="mainnet"  # or "testnet"
$ kind="rpc"       # or "archive"
$ aws s3 --no-sign-request cp "s3://near-protocol-public/backups/${chain:?}/${kind:?}/latest" .
$ latest=$(cat latest)
$ aws s3 sync --delete --no-sign-request  "s3://near-protocol-public/backups/${chain:?}/${kind:?}/${latest:?}" ~/.near/data

For a faster snapshot download speed, use s5cmd, the download accelerator for S3 written in Go. For download instruction, please see https://github.com/peak/s5cmd.

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