Backup and recovery

[John Ralls]

> On Dec 19, 2015, at 10:27 AM, Alaric <um.167 at xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> 
> I do not use Gnucash for backups.  I back up my home directory which contains all data files including emails using a backup system based on rsync.  I have tried recovery from the backup on an external hard drive, from cds and from an old hard disk still installed in the computer.  If they work I have an empty file.  Mostly they return an error message that there is no suitable backend.  That is a Gnucash error message.
> 
> I don't follow the comment about the filename.  When I set up the account I saved it with a filename like AWW15.  It has no suffix because that is the way Gnucash saved it.  My file manager records it as an archive file and the 'Properties' menu shows it as a gzip file.
> 
> 	Because of my display problem on Linux I have installed a number of different distros and each time have recovered the accounts without any problems.  This is the first time there has been trouble.
> 

Do you have Retain Log/Backup Files in Preferences>General set to “Never”? Do you delete old versions of backed up files (e.g. with the —delete option to rsync)? If so, then while that ensures that you’re protected against a disk crash, if you’re saving only one instance of each file you’re not protected against corruption either because of a bug or disk degradation rather than abrupt failure.

That said, your problem sounds like in might be the libxml2 gzip bug. Try uncompressing it with gunzip. You’ll need to rename it to AWW15.gz first, gunzip will rename it back.

Regards,
John Ralls