gnucash 2.2.4 backup of monthly transaction postings

[Tommy Trussell]

On 8/26/08, Donald Federdpiel <don at feders.net> wrote:
>  I have been using GNUCash 2.2.4 since April, 2008, for personal fiances
>  and a small business and am very happy with its performance.
>
>  One question...insofar as every system needs a periodic backup I would
>  like to know how to backup the Accounts data file (s) after
>  my monthly postings.  In previous Quicken software I simply "copied and
>  dropped" the Quicken data files form the Hard Disk Drive to a floppy
>  disk
>  drive and I was backed up every 30 days.
>
>  Ubuntu Linux, v 8.04 is my operating system.

You can do exactly the same thing to back up your Gnucash data file.
(Though floppies are increasingly disappearing, so you may do the same
with a USB "flash" drive.)

One bugaboo that trips up many folks is remembering WHERE they created
their GnuCash data file, because if you don't specify otherwise, it
helpfully opens the file you last opened each time you launch the
application. And since GnuCash itself doesn't care how you named the
data file (it doesn't even need an extension) you might have trouble
searching for it.

If you don't remember the data file's name, it appears at the top of
the Accounts window.

When you view the directory the data file is stored in, you may also
see lots of files starting with the same name plus lots of digits and
ending in .xac and .log -- those are intermediate backups of your
data. Notice that the digits indicate the date and time -- GnuCash
will keep as many days' worth of those files around as you specify in
your preferences.

For your purposes, you can copy just the data file, or the entire
directory if that's easier. You only need the intermediate files to
recover your last posted entries after a system crash of some sort.