Managing the database size

[John Morris]

  I have only been using GnuCash for about eighteen months, so I may have missed something, but my impression is that it provides no significant archiving system. Given that gaping hole in the feature list, I have cobbled together a plan for myself. Basically, I plan to pare off data more than five years old at the start and middle of each decade, saving a GnuCash file for that period of time.

  This leaves me with convenient access to only the last five to ten years of data, but it seems to keep the data file from getting unwieldy. Since I migrated from Quicken, I already had twenty years of data to start trying this concept. Therefore, I imported the whole Quicken file and then pared off the old data into an especially large GnuCash file. That way, if I ever really need to know the state of my finances in 1997, I can get to it.

  Of course, another downside of this plan is that I'll have to either keep using GnuCash forever or convert all those old data files to whatever new system I switch to in thirty years. I plan to burn that bridge when I get to it.


  The process of paring off the data is fairly simple. I save a copy of the current data file and label it for the years it contains. Then I run Doug's gcCull.pl on the main datafile to clear out the old years. Doug posted gcCull.pl to this list about fifteen months ago.

Best,
John

> On Dec 26, 2015, at 7:39 PM, aeneas <receiver at gowdygroup.net> wrote:
> 
> GNUcash is something that is used constantly over a long period of time
> (i.e., ideally a lifetime or even more).  As such the amount of data
> contained in the database grows and eventually becomes a problem.  How long
> that takes depends on many things and will be different for just about
> everyone.  However, software like this requires some kind of archiving
> capability.  Insofar as it is desirable to also retain a large amount of
> historical data the archiving process requires the ability to perform some
> kind of operation that preserves data older than a specified date in a file,
> which I'm calling an archive, and flushes (i.e., removes) that same older
> data from the active file.
> 
> I'm just now considering whether or not I want to invest the time and effort
> to adopt the use of GNUcash but couldn't find any information about how to
> archive in the available documentation.  Hopefully this is just a matter of
> my ignorance about the terminology that might be employed with this
> software.
> 
> I'd appreciate any advice on how to figure out how to do archiving.