Backup Files

[Dave Sergeant]

I hear what you are saying.... my usage is sufficiently low that I can 
easily get back to what I was at the last manual backup, and in 
experience with other programs I have never ever lost data. The 
multitudinous backups GC produces do nothing for me, although others 
clearly benefit.

You missed the other point I made. I have indeed turned off backup 
files by setting the 'time to keep' to never. But this does NOT turn 
off the production of logfiles which the documentation indicates it 
should. That looks like a bug.

Dave

On 6 Feb 2013 at 10:09, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Dave Sergeant" <dave at davesergeant.com> writes:
> 
> > I posted about this last week. I have set the option to never save
> > logs. This has indeed stopped the generation of backup files. But logs
> > are still being generated in profusion so clearly they are NOT treated
> > the same.
> >
> > The way GC generates backup files embedded with the date is most
> > confusing. I would be happy for it to keep a single backup, of the
> > previous version, but not countless numbers of them. I am never ever
> > going to use them as in any case I do manual backups to external media
> > at regular intervals. The logfiles are redundant once I have closed
> > the application and no use whatsoever.
> 
> There is a real reason to keep multiple backups, and that is because if
> you make a mistake you might not realize it for a while.  If it only
> kept a single backup then you'd be out of luck if you didn't notice the
> error the next time you saved!  Whereas with the current method you
> could EASILY see when the error got introduced.
> 
> Similarly with log files, they can be used not only for auditing
> purposes, but also to replay in the case that you need to go back in
> time to fix an error.
> 
> I admit that generally these kinds of errors are more often data
> corruption bugs in the code, so it more applies during development and
> alpha testing releases than in stable releases, but the fact remains
> that periodically we do find data corruption bugs where having real
> backups are priceless.  Even if you have your own backup scheme, it
> might not backup the data file as frequently as gnucash would.
> 
> But this is why you can turn it off if you so choose.
> 


http://www.davesergeant.com