I was reading that some people were able to migrate their old index directories to a new machine and not needing to reindex.
But for me it acts as if the chainstate directory is “corrupt”, even though those files were working just fine on the old node. I suspect that it’s not really corrupt, but that bitcoin core isn’t reading it correctly.
The exact message I see in the logs:
Using obfuscation key for /data/.bitcoin/chainstate
and then it would reload bitcoind and show this message again, in a loop, and never actually complete starting bitcoind.
What makes this migration process not work for some people, like myself?
I copied the following 4 dirs from the source node to the target node, exactly as they were with no extra or missing files.
bitcoin/blocks/
bitcoin/blocks/index/
bitcoin/chainstate/
bitcoin/indexes/
And using reindex-chainstate=1 in the config file takes a long time (already been 3 days and it’s still not halfway done).
There’s probably something that needs to be set for the chainstate directory to be compatible on the new node with bitcoind.