What are files named something like Filename.gnucash.tmp-a00396

[Colin Law]

On 4 February 2015 at 14:52, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Dennis Shimer <dshimer at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I understand the backups and the log files but recently I had friend with a
>> gnucash file just disappear. One day it's there, the next it isn't I'm not
>> done helping him trace down what actually happened but there was a file
>> with the extension .tmp-a00396. I know he is using a fairly recent version
>> on Windows 7 and the file looks like something ver near the last saved
>> version of the .gnucash file.
>>
>> What is this file, where does it come from, and how likely that it is in
>> fact a complete copy of what he was last working on?
>
> You say this is on Win7; is this on a file share server, by chance?
>
> This file is a temporary file that GnuCash uses during the save process.
> It creates a new file, writes the data into it, then moves the old file
> to a backup and renames the temporary file to the filename.  If GnuCash
> gets interrupted during the process it could, theoretically, leave the
> temp file hanging around.

Since I think the OP's original problem was that his accounts file had
disappeared then possibly what happened was that gc was interrupted
(power fail for example) just at the moment the old file had been
renamed to the backup file, but before the temp file was renamed to be
the original accounts file name.  That would explain both the presence
of the temp file and the absence of the original file.

Colin