System crash, gnucash taunting me, part N+1

[Boris Goldowsky]

> this morning it happened again: X hung up, with an open gnucash. I had 
> just
> entered _a lot_ of transactions. And they are alllll there, in the 
> .log.
>
> And again, it is sitting there, taunting me, writing a transaction 
> logfile
> with no means of parsing it. _PLEASE_ someone tell me that there is a 
> script
> to do it?
> [...]
> Any help would be really, really appreciated.
>
>
> Sincerely,
> 	Lars

Sorry, Lars, I have no immediate help for you.

But I've encountered similar situations - I often run Gnucash over ssh 
from a different machine, and sometimes the ssh connection gets 
disconnected.  I have not lost a lot yet, since I do save often.

One thing that would be useful in this situation is that if Gnucash 
received a hangup signal (or was sent one on purpose with kill -1), it 
should save and exit cleanly.  If you you want to preserve the behavior 
of never-overwrite-datafile-unless-explicitly-told-to-do-so, you could 
have the save in that case go into a different file - <filename>.crash, 
say.  Then you could use it or not, as appropriate.

I think Emacs's behavior is a good model.  Auto-save regularly (to a 
different filename), and in particular always auto-save when exiting 
with unsaved changes, if at all possible.

Personally, I'm going to try to do a database-backed install next time 
I upgrade gnucash, since it would neatly avoid this problem.

Bng

PS - Gnucash is SO much better than Quicken, though - Quicken used to 
corrupt my entire data file regularly.