importing old GnuCash files

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 04 February 2011, Matthew Weymar wrote:
> First of all: Thank you very much, David. This is informative, helpful and
> much appreciated.
> 
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:48 PM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > It's more likely that you had 2.0.5. That was the stable version out at
> > the time; 2.1.x is an unstable version for development purposes, and you
> > would have been advised against using this.
> > 
> > If it was version 2.0.5, I see that there was an issue with scheduled
> > transactions and upgrades; the instructions in the list back then were to
> > open the file in 2.0.x and remove your scheduled transactions, and then
> > open in 2.2.9. From there, I'd just try opening the file in 2.4.0.
> > 
> > You can get 2.2.9 and 2.4.0 on sourceforge.net; older versions are
> > apparently only available as tar.gz files at
> > http://www.gnucash.org/pub/gnucash/sources/stable/, which would probably
> > have to be built from scratch.
> > 
> > If you didn't have any scheduled transactions (if you don't know what I'm
> > talking about, then you didn't)
> 
> Unlikely I had scheduled transactions, but my memory, at least for this
> sort of thing, is exceptionally poor.
> 
> > I would try opening the file with 2.2.9 and seeing what happens.
> 
> Downloaded 2.2.9 and installed (over 2.4.0), but on launch, I get: "The
> procedure entry point gnc_build_book_path could not be located in the dll
> libgnc-core-utils-0.dll."
> 
You should uninstall 2.4.0 before installing 2.2.9 to prevent this error. What 
you can do now, is uninstall 2.2.9, then completely remove the gnucash 
directory from your "Program Files" directory and install again.

> If / when I get 2.2.9 running, can someone please confirm: The file I want
> to open is ~/.gnucash/qif-accounts-map? And that's the only file I have to
> grab from my previous install?...
> 
That file is not your data file. As David says, it is a file used by GnuCash 
internally when importing from qif files.

A hint to find your data file can be that if you didn't change the default 
preferences regarding log files and backups, your data file should be 
accompanied by a series of files wich are named based on the name of your 
datafile. For example, if you saved your data 2007 with the name 
mygnucashdata, then you will likely also find files called
mygnucashdata.<datestamp>.xac and mygnucashdata.<datestamp>.log right next to 
it.

Geert