HELP!!! Lost data

Josh Sled jsled at asynchronous.org
Tue Jan 25 19:24:58 EST 2005


On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 18:57, baf11 wrote:

> have a directory with the following files in my data directory:
> $ find GnuCash
> GnuCash
> GnuCash/GnuCash_data.20041229094712.log
> GnuCash/GnuCash_data.20040524203836.xac

These files are auto-generated by gnucash during use.  The .xac files
are straight backups, and the .log files are a transaction-style log
that can be replayed.

> You can see that one of the log files is marked 5/24/2004, which is VERY
> suspicious to me.  

It's not /that/ suspicious; we make backups files on every use, and
they're timestamped.

> Is there a way that some pointer to future logs could
> have gotten borked during a power failure?  

No; we don't keep forward-looking data-file pointers.

> Is there a way to fix this
> or reapply the logs, like a transactional database?

Assuming you don't remove old transactions or data like most users, the
size of the datafile should be strictly increasing.  Therefore, the
largest ".xac" datafile backup _should_ be the most recent.  I'd look to
see if there's a big difference in the sizes of those .xac backup file
over time; if there's a big drop, then the file before the drop is
/probably/ the "last known good" state of the file.

The .log files can be replayed as per the menu item in the File menu.

...jsled

-- 
http://asynchronous.org/ - `a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo ${a}@${b}`


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