Node Snapshots

Download and restore Base node snapshots to significantly reduce initial sync time for nodes.

Using a snapshot significantly reduces the initial time required to sync a Base node. Snapshots are updated regularly.

If you’re a prospective or current Base node operator, you can restore from a snapshot to speed up your initial sync. Follow the steps below carefully.

Restoring from Snapshot

These steps assume you are in the cloned node directory (the one containing docker-compose.yml).

These steps use the base-reth-node CLI to download snapshots. If you don’t already have it, follow the installation instructions to install it first.

1. Prepare Data Directory:

   • Before running Docker for the first time, create the data directory on your host machine that will be mapped into the Docker container. This directory must match the volumes mapping in the docker-compose.yml file.
     mkdir ./reth-data
     
   • If you have previously run the node and have an existing data directory, stop the node (docker compose down), remove the contents of the existing directory (e.g. rm -rf ./reth-data/*), and proceed.

2. Choosing the chain: Use the --chain flag to select the network

   Network	--chain value
   Base Mainnet	base
   Base Sepolia	base-sepolia

3. Download Snapshot: V2 snapshots are split into many small, segmented files rather than a single archive. The CLI lists one archive snapshot because it contains all available files. The full and minimal options select progressively smaller subsets of that archive:

   Config	Flag	What you get	Use when
   Minimal	--minimal	The smallest set needed to boot: latest state + headers (plus the minimum required history).	You want the fastest, smallest download and don’t need historical data.
   Full	--full	Full-node data matching the default full-node prune settings (state, headers, and a bounded window of transactions, receipts, and history).	You want a standard full node without keeping the entire archive.
   Archive	--archive	Everything available — all transactions, receipts, and account/storage history, with no pruning.	You need complete historical data (e.g. archive queries, indexing).

   Ensure you have enough free disk space to download the snapshot and extract its contents. The extracted data will be significantly larger than the archive.

   The above presets are convenient defaults that are available at chain.base.org/snapshots. You may still configure custom pruning flags with the flag. It is required to download the archival snapshot and then configure your custom pruning args.

   # Minimal node on Base Mainnet
   base-reth-node download --minimal --datadir ./reth-data --chain base --resumable
   
   # Full node on Base Sepolia
   base-reth-node download --full --datadir ./reth-data --chain base-sepolia --resumable
   

   Alternatively, for archival nodes only, you may run base db migrate-v2. However, this is expected to take much longer than downloading. --resumable is also not supported in migrate-v2.

4. (Optional) - tuning download concurrency:

   The --download-concurrency flag controls how many simultaneous HTTP downloads run across the whole snapshot job. It defaults to 8, which is a good baseline for most machines.

   If you have high-end hardware, you can safely increase it to speed up the download. A good rule of thumb is 2× the number of physical CPU cores:

   # Example: a 16 physical-core machine
   base-reth-node download --full --datadir ./reth-data --chain base --download-concurrency 32
   

5. Start the Node: Now that the snapshot data is in place, return the root of your Base node folder and start the node:

   cd ..
   docker compose up --build
   

   Your node should begin syncing from the last block in the snapshot.

6. Verify: Monitor the node logs (docker compose logs -f <service_name>) or use the sync monitoring command to ensure the node starts syncing from the snapshot’s block height.

Proofs Snapshots

V2 Proofs Snapshots are coming soon.

If you are running the historical proofs ExEx, snapshots of the proofs database are available to skip the 24-48 hour backfill.

Proofs snapshots are still distributed as archives, so you’ll need aria2c, a resumable downloader that handles the periodic connection interruptions imposed by Cloudflare. If you don’t have it installed:

macOS

brew install aria2

Network	Download Command
Testnet	aria2c -c -x 16 -s 16 "https://sepolia-reth-proofs-snapshots.base.org/$(curl -s https://sepolia-reth-proofs-snapshots.base.org/latest)"
Mainnet	aria2c -c -x 16 -s 16 "https://mainnet-reth-proofs-snapshots.base.org/$(curl -s https://mainnet-reth-proofs-snapshots.base.org/latest)"

Ensure you have enough free disk space to download the snapshot archive (.tar.gz / .tar.zst file) and extract its contents. The extracted data will be significantly larger than the archive.

Once downloaded, extract the archive. Replace snapshot-filename with the actual downloaded filename:

tar -xzvf <snapshot-filename.tar.gz>

# For .tar.zst
tar -I zstd -xvf <snapshot-filename.tar.zst>

The extraction process will likely create a reth directory. Move the contents of that directory into the data directory you created in Prepare Data Directory in the section above:

mv ./reth/* ./reth-data/
rm -rf ./reth    # Clean up empty extracted folder

The goal is to have the chain data directories (e.g., chaindata, nodes, segments, etc.) directly inside ./reth-data, not in a nested subfolder. Once confirmed, you can safely delete the downloaded snapshot archive (.tar.gz file) to free up disk space.

Then continue from Start the Node in the section above.

FAQ

What's the difference between a Full and Minimal node?

In Reth, a “full” node is just a pruned node with a specific preset rather than a distinct node type. Reth’s --full preset retains the last 10,064 blocks (~1.4 days on Ethereum; ~5-6 hours on Base due to faster block times).

To read more about the difference between a Full and Minimal node, see the Reth docs.

How do I run my previous pruned node setup with v2 storage?

If your v1-storage pruned node had a pruning distance of more than 10064 blocks, it is required to pull an Archival snapshot and then add the prune args.

Full will not work because it’ll only have the last 10064 blocks.

I'm seeing: Archive extracted, but output verification failed.

This is caused due to a newer snapshot being uploaded during the time your download is happening. Please interrupt the download command and re-run it.

Note: The download is idempotent, so it will not re-download files that have already been downloaded; it will only fetch the diff.