Gnucash data missing

[Colin Law]

On 16 April 2014 14:23, dansaudio <dan at dmohr.com> wrote:
> Colin Law wrote
>> On 16 April 2014 05:22, dansaudio <
>
>> dan@
>
>> > wrote:
>>> It turns out that all of the credit transactions (purchases made with the
>>> credit card), as well as their corresponding splits, have disappeared.
>>> Just
>>> to clarify, this is over a 15 month history.  All debit transactions
>>> (credit
>>> card payments) are still there.  It has happened with four out of five
>>> credit cards.
>>
>> Does the credit card show a huge balance, adding up all the card
>> payments with none of the missing purchases?
>>
>> Do the expense accounts themselves that the purchases were against
>> still exist or have the accounts themselves somehow got lost?
>>
>> Rather than go back to the backup of a couple of weeks ago you should
>> be able to find the last working backup in the folder where the data
>> file is stored.  They are called something like
>> <your accounts file
>> name>
>> .
>> <datetimestamp>
>> .gnucash.  Having found the last one that works
>> have a look at the log files that come between it and the first that
>> is wrong and you may see what happened.
>>
>> Colin
>
> Yes,there is a huge balance on the credit cards, payments only. And yes, the
> accounts the purchases are against are still there, and one of the credit
> cards is still intact (1 out of 5 cards).
>
> I found a more recent backup that still works. (I will need to learn how to
> open and read the log files when I get back to this.)
>
> In the back ups, there is an anomaly in the file naming occurring
> simultaneously with the problem with the data. There appears to be a
> timestamp and file extension following the gnucash file extension. There are
> a few of these anololies then the file structure returns to normal, but with
> corrupted data. I believe this is the root of the problem, but do not
> understand yet how this happened. The (I believe to be incorrect) file name
> is structured as follows:
>
> <your accounts file name>.<datetimestamp>.gnucash,<datetimestamp>,gnucash

That means you opened one of the backup files and saved it (possibly
automatic save) so it then saved a backup of the backup by adding a
further timestamp.gnucash to the end again.

>
> For a log file, the structure is as follows:
>
> <your accounts file name>.<datetimestamp>.gnucash,<datetimestamp>,log

That is the log of when you opened the backup file <your accounts file
name>.<datetimestamp>.gnucash, to which it added <datetimestamp>,log

If the final timestamps of these are today then they are just the
result of you looking at the backups today in order to find a good
one.  If they are old then at some previous time you opened one of the
backups.

Colin