Custom Reports and Backup

[Fred Bone]

On 26 May 2009 at 16:29, Mike or Penny Novack said:

> Colin Scott wrote:
> 
> >In the Windows world, the file containing custom reports is saved in the
> >windows "Documents and Settings" tree.  However, when it comes to backing
> >up up my gnucash data, I would really like to have the reports
> >definitions saved with my data, rather then buried away in some obscure
> >location that no sane person voluntarily uses for anything!
> >
> >Is there some way of controlling where this file is placed?
> >
> >Colin
> >_______________________________________________
> >
> >  
> >
> Not sure exactly what you are asking. Your GnuCash data is presumably 
> also in the Documents and Settings\youruserid TREE unless you really 
> went out of your way to save it elsewhere. Just not necessarily in the 
> same directory (file folder) in that tree. Each user's Documents and 
> Settings is where all their data goes (private data) unless they specify 
> that it go in the user share directory Documents and Settings\All Users. 
> Backup strategies vary. In my own case I back up the entire Documents 
> and Settings directory for each user on the system instead of expecting 
> the data from each application to be backed up separately (more work, 
> and besides, the same data types might be from several different 
> applications -- for example, a .doc file might have been created by MS 
> Word, MS Office, Open Office, Abiword, etc.).
> 
> If you want your GnuCash books (and the incremental save/log) in the 
> same directory as where the report definitions get put, why don't you 
> just make it so? You can choose where (what directory) your books and 
> their associated save/logs get put. You don't have to use the default 
> directory for that. I don't.

I don't use the default directory either - I use a subdirectory of the 
"My Documents" directory.

However, the "custom report" definitions are not stored under "My 
Documents" (which is where one is "supposed" to store one's visible 
files, as opposed to application control data) - they go in a sibling 
directory. In my case that's "c:\documents and settings\fred\.gnucash" 
and there doesn't seem to be any choice in the matter. I suspect this may 
be because Gnucash needs to find the definitions at startup, perhaps 
before it has even looked for the data files.

Yes it is possible to store the data file there, but (a) to do so would 
be to clutter up Gnucash's user-definitions directory with all the backup 
and transaction-log files and (b) if there's only one set of definitions 
per user, it's a bit hard to make the one copy live in all the 
directories where the user might want to store data files.