I am trying to create a wallet on my computer with bitcoind following this guide. I installed it, ran it, and monitored the process with bitcoin-cli. It went on for about 15 hours, at which it failed with an error message: "Error: Error: Disk space is low!". bitcoind had taken up the whole 160 Gb available in my home disk.
How can I safely free up the space taken by bitcoind? Should it be uninstalled? Or delete files (which?) will suffice?
The quide you followed is 3 years old. Since then, there was an option added called prune - add it to a line in your bitcoind.conf, like so:
prune=50000
And restart bitcoind. This would effectively limit your blockchain size to only 50Gb of recent blocks.
In case you need to have a full blockchain available for research & analysis, there is no other way but to buy a bigger HD.
In case you don't need the local blockchain at all, then there is very little reason not to use a lightweight client like Electrum which does not store anything on your HD but instead relies on proprietary servers.
