backing up main data file

Harold hh6199 at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 25 21:47:52 EST 2008


New to Gnucash 2.2.6 in Mepis 8 Beta 6.

I was just looking at backing up Gnucash. I did some searching and read several posts about what files to back up. Ended up at the help manual in the section 2.8.4 File Management. It says: "So which files should you keep around? Keep your main data file, of
course - data files do not have an automatic file extension. It's a
good idea to keep some of the more recent .xac files, but you can
safely delete the .log files since they are not complete copies of your
data. You should also delete any .LCK and .LNK files that you see after
closing GnuCash. If you decide to manually back up your data file to
another disk, you only need to back up the main data file - not the
.xac files."

Then it dawned on me that I didn't know what the main data file is and where it is stored. I looked in my home folder and I have a list of files that are zipped, .xac, and .log. The first file in the list of the afore mentioned files is a zip file that 16.6 KB in size and bears my and my wife's name because I gave it that name. It seems to stay the same size. I would think that the main data file would grow larger as you add transactions. 

There are several log files that are larger. I looked in the .gnucash folder but didn't see what I thought might be the main data file. So my questions are, where is the main data file located and what is the name of it?

Thanks
Harold



      


More information about the gnucash-user mailing list