recovery

[Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2007 20:55:07 -0600
Ron Morse <rbmorse at comcast.net> wrote:

> I think I would be more interested in fixing whatever is causing the
> crash in the first place. Frequent crashing of either an application
> or the operating system is neither normal or correct. There is a
> problem there that needs to be addressed. 
> 
> Ron Morse
> 
> On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 22:13 +0000, Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz wrote:
> > I am sure crash recovery is not an issue for too many users. As it
> > is, I crash at least once a day and I am not finding this manual
> > process very end-user friendly.
> > 
> > I just had a crash and I am presented with 7 log files which were
> > ....
> > 
> > In my view, the end user should not have to dig around log files in
> > order to recover. Quicken does not need to to recover after a crash
> > as every transaction is saved when committed. When OpenOffice
> > crashes, you simply press a recover button. Would that not be
> > possible with gnucash?


Of course, I would like to see the crash fixed in the first place
rather than having to worry about my data and wasting time on restart
and recovery. 

However, it's a fact of life that applications crash occasionally. And
my point is that an end-user should not have to deal with this level of
detail. I doubt that a plain ordinary user (not
someone who also happens to develop software) would cope when being
presented with x log files and I doubt that he would even realize that
the file names are time-stamped. The whole idea is flawed if a user has
to recover manually by selecting the right log files.

Structural changes are not replayed (at least not in 2.0.5);
transactions against accounts which did not exist prior to the recovery
point will go into IMBALANCE. Imagine the mess if you created several
accounts in the meantime.

And what happens if you accidentally replay a log file which needn't
have been replayed? Double transactions? 

How is the user supposed to do a sanity check? I have probably 200
accounts. I cannot remember all the transactions I entered during the
day and certainly not what I did before and after the last save.

I have little experience of other accounting applications and I
certainly would not like to go back to Quicken. But at least I had
peace of mind because it simply saved every transactions when it was
committed. I used to work on a permanently crashing Winblows machine
and never once lost a transaction.

I can see that it would be too slow to save a 13MB xml file after every
transaction. Why use xml anyway? 



--


Best Regards,

Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz


A: Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion
Q: Why is top posting bad?