Questions Regarding Backup and Stopping Gnucash

[Mark Phillips]

I run gnucash on a Debian laptop. I set up a cron job to copy the gnucash
folder to an external NAS and my google drive as backups. So far everything
is working correctly.

My questions:

* I understand that gnucash reads the entire data file into memory. When is
the data written out again? My concern is if I forget to close gnucash and
the backup script runs, have I lost the updates for that day? I don't mean
lost as in gone, just they will not be in the backup for that day, but will
be in the backup for the next day.

* What would be a good way to shut down gnucash from my backup script so it
saves all the data before the backup is run? I usually shutdown gnucash
before I go to bed (the cron job runs at 3 am), but sometimes I forget. I
am a little worried that killing the gnucash process may not be the best
way to shut it down.

Thanks,

Mark