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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 NetworkS3 Path
RPC testnets3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/rpc/latest
RPC mainnets3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/rpc/latest
Archival testnets3://near-protocol-public/backups/testnet/archive/latest
Archival mainnets3://near-protocol-public/backups/mainnet/archive/latest

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.

Another alternative is rclone. This tool is present in many Linux distributions. There is also a version for Windows. And its main merit is multithread. You can read about it on

First, install rclone:

$ sudo apt install rclone

Next, prepare config, so you don't need to specify all the parameters interactively:

mkdir -p ~/.config/rclone
touch ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

, and paste the following config into rclone.conf:

[near_s3]
type = s3
provider = AWS
location_constraint = EU
acl = public-read
server_side_encryption = AES256
region = ca-central-1

Next step very similar with aws-cli. 

chain="mainnet"  # or "testnet"
kind="rpc"       # or "archive"
rclone copy --no-check-certificate near_s3://near-protocol-public/backups/${chain:?}/${kind:?}/latest ./
latest=$(cat latest)
rclone copy --no-check-certificate --progress --transfers=6 \
  near_s3://near-protocol-public/backups/${chain:?}/${kind:?}/${latest:?} ~/.near/data

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