Backups when original is on encrypted volume, how?

[John Ralls]

> On Jan 1, 2015, at 8:58 AM, Jeff Earickson <jaearick at colby.edu> wrote:
> 
> All,
> 
> I am paranoid, so I keep my Gnucash files on an encrypted Mac OS volume.
> To use Gnucash, I unplug the Ethernet cable, decrypt the volume, go do my
> Gnucash work, unmount the volume.
> 
> Before unmounting the volume, I have been saving my Gnucash folder to a
> thumbdrive as a backup.  I have discovered that the backup does not work
> unless the encrypted volume is mounted.  With no encrypted volume, I get
> the message "The file file:///Volumes/encrypted/gnucash/mydata.gnucash
> could not be found."
> 
> How do I make a backup of my Gnucash data so that a restore will work when
> the original volume is gone?  Does the .gnucash directory in my homedir
> factor into how this works?

I keep my books on an encrypted volume, too, but I don't unplug the ethernet when I'm using it. That would make it hard to get price quotes and to download transactions.

Anyway, the error sounds like the expected startup message when Gnucash can't find the last-used file. You can either rename the thumb drive's volume to "encrypted" (use Disk Manager, IIRC you'll have to reformat the volume) and put a gnucash directory on it with mydata.gnucash so that when it's mounted the path to mydata.gnucash is the same or you can just use File>Open to navigate to myfile.gnucash on the existing thumb-drive path.

Regards,
John Ralls