on 15th Dec, gnucash mysteriously rolled back to 08th Dec's backup

[Maf. King]

On Friday 17 December 2010 10:00:38 Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> Short story:
>
>     what can be the reason that on 15th morning gnucash loaded the
>     historical version of 08th instead of the last version (on 09th)?

>
>     yuliansu at Andalusia:~/Financial/gnucash$ ls -l rss.gnucash.201012*.xac
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 yuliansu users 84741 2010-11-29 15:21
>     rss.gnucash.20101208150756.xac
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 yuliansu users 85335 2010-12-08 15:07
>     rss.gnucash.20101208151351.xac
>
<<SNIP>>
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 yuliansu users 87268 2010-12-10 10:37
>     rss.gnucash.20101210164240.xac
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 yuliansu users 84741 2010-11-29 15:21
>     rss.gnucash.20101215100749.xac
>     -rw-r--r-- 1 yuliansu users 85128 2010-12-15 10:07

>
>     Besides my user, no one else touched the computer. The only "person"
>     other than my user that might touched the computer might be a small
>     backup script. I checked the backup script and found following its
>     program logic, it should not be able to do any write operation to
>     anything in user's home directory except in some exceptional cases
>     might write to the hidden files in the home directory, a.k.a.
>     ~/.[^.]* which should include .gnucash. In short the backup script
>     is not capable of writing to ~/Financial/gnucash where main data is
>     stored in, but with a small chance may write to .gnucash.
>
>     So my question at this point is, can a change in .gnucash result
>     gnucash loading a historical version of .xac file and use it as main
>     .gnucash data file (and write to the main .gnucash data file)?
>
>     thanks for helping solve the mystery in advance.

Hi Zhang,

Sorry that this post is probably no better than my last, but I noticed that 
the first file in your list is also inconsistent in the date and file name. 
and furthermore 1st dec is 1 week before 8th dec....

I think that your backup script may be to blame - and I have to say, it seems 
odd to me that a backup job would change the files that it backs up, without 
manual intervention or restoring?!

on the subject of the .gnucash directory, it has been posted on here that the 
contents of that directory should never be touched by anything other than GC.

HTH,
Maf.