Bitcoind --reindex vs starting allover again I setup a Bitcoin Daemon on a VM hosted on an OpenStack cloud. VM has 8 Cores and 32GB of Ram and 20GB of storage. I mounted a 1TB volume into the .Bitcoin/blocks folder. I started bitcoind and it downloaded about 139GB of the chain. 
I was working on the web stuff when i accidentally restarted the VM.

"error: Could not locate RPC credentials. No authentication cookie could be       
found, and no rpcpassword is set in the configuration file   
(/home/ubuntu/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf)"

bitcoind -rescan 
: Error loading block database.


and bitcoind -reindex takes really long time and is still processing. The 138GB are untouched but it looks like --reindex is changing the files in /index.

What will be faster? deleting the 138GB of blockchain and starting bitcoind -daemon all over or bitcoind --reindex
bitcoind --reindex will be faster because starting over from scratch would not only do all the work bitcoind --reindex is doing, but it'd also have to go out and re-download all those blocks too.