backing up main data file

[Mike or Penny Novack]

Just a general comment about "back up"

Backing up GnuCash data is simply a special case of backing up ALL of 
your user data. For some reason man users of this as well as other 
applications of all sorts expect backup to be part of the application's 
responsibility and seem to want to back up each sort of data separately.

That's a lot of work and fails to address the main issue. This is data 
on computer hardware and you need to treat the matter as one where it 
isn't a question of "if" the system dies and your data goes west but 
"when". You need a general solution to deal with the problem. For 
example, those using a 'nix operating system probably want to be making 
a periodic backup of the /home directory. Those using Windows probably 
want to be backing up the C:\Documents and Settings\user id directory.

An external USB drive that once a month (or whenever) you take out of 
the fire safe and hook up to make another backup is cheap. Having a data 
recovery lab attempt to recover data from a head crashed of fire smoked 
hard drive is not (and no guarantees of success). If this sounds 
extreme, a few days more than two years ago we had a house fire ..........

Michael

PS --- If you noticed that I wasn't discussing software changes, those 
you best don't back up on a set period but whenever you do a "build". If 
you haven't changed software in the last six months, then the backups 
you made before/after that "build" six months a go are still current. Of 
course if you are doing software updates all the time, unpredictable, 
then you do want a periodic backup. But software is best kept separate 
form data.