Question: I'm sure this has been asked many times before, but I've recently gotten into the whole cryptocurrency thing starting with Dogecoin, and I now want to use Bitcoin as well. I am on Windows 7. I found out the hard way that downloading the blockchain through bitcoin-qt takes forever, so I went to <https://bitcoin.org/bin/blockchain/> and downloaded the torrent rather than waiting ages. I now have bootstrap.dat ready, but I don't know where to put it. I have two storage drives - a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard drive. Because of the SSDs small size and the amount of small writes that bitcoin will do I opted to store the client and blockchain on my HDD. According to <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory> I need to place the file at %appdata%\Bitcoin. Since appdata is located on the C drive, there is no bitcoin directory there. The rest of that article is for other operating systems.

Where should I place the bootstrap.dat file?

Answer: 
i didn't have to place the bootstrap file anywhere specific -- instead, i indicated it with the `loadblock` option:

```
\path\to\bitcoin-core\bitcoin-qt.exe --loadblock=\path\to\bootstrap.dat

```
Yes, confirmed - copy to `C:\%userprofile%\Appdata\Bitcoin\`

Relaunch the Bitcoin client. In bottom left, it will say "importing blocks from disk..."