Cleaning up and backing up

[Fred Bone]

On 17 May 2011 at 9:58, gcu.10.jgbrown at spamgourmet.com said:

> Greetings...
> 
> I need to clean up and establish a regular backup protocol for my Gnucash
> data. Let's start simple and discuss just the cleanup.

[...]
> Questions:
> 
> 1) Can I delete all the .log files in this directory?

Yes if you are sure you won't need them. They are the means of recovering 
if you need to revert to a backup and go forward from there.

> 2) Can I delete all but the most recent few .xac files (after backing up
> the older files)? 

Yes if you are sure you won't need them. They are the automatic backups 
created by Gnucash when you do a save and are paired with .log files. 
Gnucash cleans up old ones ("old" being as you define in Preferences > 
General), but see below.

3) Can I rename accounts.20110102212607.xac to just
> plain 'accounts' and use that as the default data file from now on?

You can rename it to anything you like. However, what I would do is open 
Gnucash and do a "Save as ...", which achieves the same thing except that 
Gnucash will remember the new name so you won't have to go looking for it 
next time you open the program.

Note that the automatic deletion of old backups only applies to backups 
of the "current" file, so if you rename the working file then the backups 
using the previous name will hang around until manually deleted.