Lightweight Filecoin chain snapshots are a segment of the Filecoin chain exported to a Content Addressable aRchives (CAR) file. They contain a chain segment large enough to allow the Filecoin network consensus protocol to apply messages successfully (2x+ finality; 1 for consensus; 1 for reorgs). Lightweight snapshots become less useful the older they are (as the chain progresses). The goal of providing lightweight snapshots is to allow users to join the network as quickly as possible.
<aside> ⚠️ These lightweight snapshots do not contain any message receipts.
</aside>
This is a new service to provide lightweight chain snapshots to the Filecoin community for Mainnet and Calibrationnet. This service will replace the current documented snapshots steps in the Lotus Chain Management Documentation in late September. We will be working with the community to deprecate the use of the fil-chain-snapshots-fallback s3 bucket snapshots. We recommend that you start to replace your usage for lightweight snapshots with the new provided URLs below and if you run into any issues or have feedback provide it to us so we can resolve any issues you may be facing.
If you run into issues with the snapshots provided below or have feedback you can open a discussion topic on the Filecoin Chain Archiver repository.
The snapshot links issue a 302 Found redirecting to the latest snapshot file. Snapshots files are named in the format of <height>_YYYY_MM_DDTHH_MM_SSZ.car where the date & time is the chain timestamp for the given height. The height is the highest TipSet height in the chain.
These links can be used directly with Lotus --chain-import flag, the redirect will be followed.
Snapshots are about 100GB and contain 2000 TipSets and are produced every 2 hours, snapshots are preserved for 14 days.
<https://snapshots.mainnet.filops.net/minimal/latest>
Additionally a zstd compressed snapshot are available at almost 50% of the size, the user must decompress prior to passing into lotus.
<https://snapshots.mainnet.filops.net/minimal/latest.zst>
Snapshots are about 250MB and contain 2000 TipSets and are produced every 2 hours, snapshots are preserved for 14 days.
<https://snapshots.calibrationnet.filops.net/minimal/latest>
Additionally a zstd compressed snapshot are available at almost 50% of the size, the user must decompress prior to passing into lotus.
<https://snapshots.calibrationnet.filops.net/minimal/latest.zst>