How to transfer gnucash data and accounts tree from gnucash running on windows to gnucash running on linux?

[John Ralls]

On Nov 1, 2011, at 4:45 PM, Frederic Monestel wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> I am going to install the new gnucash 2.4.8 on a linux laptop.
> But I would like to import all my data and account tree I have been using
> for a while on gnucash 2.2.9 (running on my windows machine).
> Anybody could shed some light on the simplest way to do this?
> 
> And to make things easier I want to start using a database back-end to
> store my data.
> Is there any best practice tutorial on how to use the database back-end?
> I would particularly like to understand how your data and the accounts tree
> are stored in the database?
> 
> Many thanks for your help and keep up the good work!

Just open the file with 2.4.8. 2.2.9 and 2.4.8 use the same file format.

It's no different using the SQL backend if you use SQLite3 except that you won't be able to read it with 2.2.9... and unless you have a MySQL or Postgresql server already set up and you're familiar with doing things like backing up your databases, running with one of them is substantially more work. There are some significant bugs [1] with the SQL backend as well.

At the moment, the database backend is used for persistence only. All of the data is read into memory at file open, just as with the XML backend. There's a schema in the wiki [2], but all relations as well as a huge chunk of "business logic" are in the program code, so accessing the data externally isn't easy.

Regards,
John Ralls



[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=gnucash-sql
[2] http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/SQL