Bitcoind linux disk usage I'm running bitcoind (086) on a dedicated linux machine with about 35Gb of disk space. Earlier today I discovered the machine ran out of space (blockchain was 33 gigs) and proceeded to delete the whole directory. Now all bitcoins in the wallet are missing, balance shows 0, although I did back up and restore the wallet.dat file.

Is it normal for the blockchain to grow to that size?

Is there another way to clean it up periodically, say, via a cron job?

Should I keep hoping that the missing coins will return to the wallet somehow, maybe after it downloads the blockchain again?

TIA!
The blockchain is around 30 gigabytes. Unfortunately, if you want to use a full node client like bitcoind, you need all of that data. It's possible to prune the blockchain to just the unspent transactions, but the core devs have not implemented this yet on bitcoind. So no, you can't reduce the blockchain size as you need all of that data for a properly running bitcoind.

There are alternatives like electrum which use something called SPV to make the footprint of the application much smaller. This does require that you trust electrum servers, but it's very hard to fake that data, so it's fairly safe.