5-1: Download Snapshot

Rather than synchronizing your Pocket node from block zero (which could take weeks), you can use a snapshot. A snapshot of the Pocket blockchain is taken every 12 hours and can be downloaded using the instructions on the Pocket Snapshots Repository README page.

tip

As of this writing, the snapshots are refreshed every 12 hours. In the GitHub repo you can look at when the README.md file was last updated to determine when the last snapshot was taken. It's best to download the snapshot that is less than a few hours old.

Here are the steps for download the snapshot using the wget command:

1. Change into the .pocket directory.

   cd ~/.pocket

2. Make a directory named data and change into it.

   mkdir data && cd data

3. Download the snapshot

   wget -qO- https://snapshot.nodes.pokt.network/latest.tar.gz | tar xvfz -

   NOTE: This process can take a few hours.