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I'm restoring a wallet from a 25 word mnemonic, I have the block chain on my Mac already... (using GUI beta1).

The GUI seems to be "synchronising blocks"... looking at my network activity it seems to be redownloading the block chain, is this expected?

Can't it just use the copy I have already... FWIW there keys are on my desktop (rather than being in the same folder as the blockchain).

What's the issue?

It's really unusual - I moved the keys to the same folder as my main wallet. I can open my main wallet and it immediately recognises that the blockchain is up to date and shows 'Connected' and my balance.

Opening the other wallet that I requested was restored from the seed and my Macs fans kick in and it starts redownloading the blockchain...

Weird?

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When you restore from a seed the wallet scans all blocks in the blockchain to find transactions belonging to the wallet. Since all transactions are hidden on the blockchain a fair amount of computation is needed for every transaction on the blockchain to find out if it belongs to the wallet or not. This can take a while, especially if you don't have a SSD disk.

To speed up the process you can input a restore height in the wizard where you enter the seed. This will force the wallet to only pull the block hashes until the restore height is reached and not scan the blocks for your transactions. It's important that the restore height is lower than the block height for the first transaction in the wallet. Otherwise transactions can be missed and your wallet will show wrong balance. To find out the restore height you can make a rough guess of the date when wallet was created and check the corresponding date on a block explorer. E.g if your wallet was created in June 2016 you could enter 1050000 as restore height which corresponds to May 18 2016.

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  • Thanks Jaquee! - heres the thing though, I notice not just CPU usage, but a lot of network activity... is this expected? I had restored Wallets from privates keys using the CLI and (on my SSD) it restores the balance in about 2 mins... – Woodstock Jan 31 '17 at 21:00
  • The network activity is much harder to explain. =) Does the sync stop when you turn of your internet connection? Do you mean private keys as in a .keys file? That file includes the block height of the wallet, so the fast refresh will be used. – Jaquee Jan 31 '17 at 21:10
  • I think I found the reason, It's doing a sync, however the 'network' activity is between the GUI and the Daemon which is a local 'web service' I guess... would this make sense? on macOS – Woodstock Jan 31 '17 at 22:00
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    Yeah, guess you could define it as some kind of local network activity. I just checked the activity monitor myself and can confirm I also have network activity even though the daemon is running on same machine. – Jaquee Jan 31 '17 at 22:13

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