Let us know how long Bitcoin Core takes to sync so we can keep track of the average sync time for Umbrel users.
Sync time should be measured from when you first plug your Umbrel in to when Bitcoin Core says 100% in the dashboard.
I’m finding long sync times (RaspberryPi 4) is closely related to a low or under powered SSD. I have been testing a node using a NVMe and have had great results.The NVMe uses much less power and is faster to sync at nearly the same cost as a large SSD.
Note: beware there are M2 SSD drives look identical to a NVMe only are slower and require more power.
Furthermore some boards don’t run NVMe so read the fine print carefully.
I cheated and synced by installing umbrel on my beefy Linux gaming PC, then copied over the synced files to my raspi 4.
Took maybe half a day.
Linux… gaming PC… well now we know you’re lying…
I originally had the Umbrel connected to a Ethernet splitter shared with my office phone’s Ethernet phone Jack. It was taking forever to sync the block chain…
I ran a home run wire to the router and now my hash rate has nearly tripled!
Still PH/s. I’m running 155 EH/s on a 100 mbit connection. What’s your bandwidth?
It took just a few hours short of five full days with ethernet cable directly into my router. I had synced bitcoin core on my desktop computer a couple of weeks before hand and it only took about three days, maybe less, and that was over Wi-Fi+VPN. Curious why it takes longer over Umbrel… Tor?
About a week.
Nope. I rarely run into issues with Linux and gaming anymore thanks to proton.
(Valve threw a ton of resources into an open source compatibility layer between DX and Linux)
Valve supports this heavily because they saw the writing on the walls with Microsoft making large moves to try and destroy the Steam marketplace and replace it with some BS app store where only Microsoft signed games can be bought…
What better way to hedge than make Linux gaming experience 100x better in the last 3 years?
The top 100 games on Steam are 77% Gold rating or above.
Mine took about a month, but only because it was using a HDD rather than an SSD.
For the love of god, use an SSD folks
Yep, if you have this happening and watch the logs, you can see the usb ssd constantly resetting due to power or data cable / enclosure issues. I think power supply and usb-sata cable both can produce thus behavior. And so blockchain download crawls.
Not sure to be honest. I have it running at my job in my office. I have better access to the router there than at home (rental situation… modem is upstairs in landlords house) Figured I’m there 6 days a week anyhow… we have a shit ton of internet lines ran to our server for a few printers and like six 8x8 phone lines connected to the router as well. So I’m sure the bandwidth is somewhat slower than a normal condition.
People, I used to “cheat” to sync on my previous installation on the Raspberry Pi, by moving all the directories within /bitcoin to a flashdrive or to the MMC memory, and leaving the DATA (blocks) directories only on the hard drive … and then symlinking the directories.
I’ve tried doing this in Umbrel but it didn’t work. I guess it’s because of the fact it runs in docker? Any ideas on how to do that ?
The easiest way is to just install umbrel from Github (instructions on the README) onto your Linux PC (or a VM with linux that you give almost 100% of your host PC’s resources)
Then once everything is synced, set up umbrel on the pi and start syncing. Wait a couple minutes til you start seeing the % go up from 0, then shut down the pi and remove the SSD.
Connect the SSD to the PC, stop the local installed umbrel using sudo ./scripts/stop as per the instructions and send over the files from the installed Umbrel to the pi’s SSD. (You don’t want to copy over bitcoin files if the source or target are currently syncing. So make sure everything bitcoin related is not running.)
The folders you want to copy are:
Once you’ve copied those over to the SSD in the proper location (you can delete the existing ones and replace them with the synced ones.) Plug it back into the pi, and start up Umbrel, it should take a while the first time booting, but it should be 100% (or close, depending on how long it takes you to copy over the files) as soon as you log in.
This is great advice @junderw!! It should be part of the readme.md! 
After encountering some problems with the IBD on the RPi, I followed your advice and did the sync on a VM (running Ubuntu 20.04). Worked flawlessly and took about a day.
One thing to note, though: When copying the bitcoin directory, I had to skip the bitcoin.conf file. Otherwise bitcoin reported some ThreadRPCServer errors, I guess because of the rpcauth password.
I built the raspberry pi version using the exact components recommend and mine synced in 2.5 days
