I have searched and searched and learned a lot But...

[Mike or Penny Novack]

So far, so good, everything matches between my Quicken file and my 
GnuCash file Account Balances except the Expense and Income Accounts 
seem to be perpetual, from the beginning of the file which in my case is 
12/31/2013, while the Asset accounts, checking, savings, fixed etc are 
correct and current. Import worked perfectly. Then I tried to create a 
Budget. What a PITA! It is like Quicken 2012 where you have to put a 
budget figure into each Account for each month. Then when I pull a 
budget report all I get is a report that "looks" cool but it only has my 
budget figures. 1.png 
<http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/file/n4675462/1.png> Now how do I 
get the actual spent and difference columns? And while I am complaining, 
choosing Accounts for inclusion in a report, any report, is very tedious 
and trial and error. I found tons of "JUST select or deselect" but it 
took a hundred searches to finally find this link about "how to Select". 
http://gnucash.1415818.n4.nabble.com/Selecting-multiple-accounts-in-reports-td3448256.html 
That works pretty good, but if you make a mistake, you have to start all 
over. You need to expand every thing that is expandable, then start at 
the top and follow the instructions for each account you want in a 
report. Is there an easier way? How do you back up your file? What in 
the ton of files in the folder do you back up? I have a bunch of other 
questions, but I will see if i get any response to this one. If anyone 
reads this, thanks for doing that much.

We are reading it. But you must realize that when you ask a number of 
very different questions those responding to you will have to pick and 
choose which to respond to. Here I'll take one of them, backing up your 
data.

"Which of the files to back up?"

Let me ask you something first, because your question might not really 
be about gnucash. Is THAT how you back up your data? You individually 
make a backup of each file? Every time you create a new document (say 
with your word processor) you add that new file to the list of files you 
back up each day, or each week, or each month, etc. (whatever you backup 
strategy might be).

Or do you instead make a backup copy of your entire "documents" 
directory? ("file folder" if you only speak Windowese) And that way, by 
copying ONE thing to your external drive or whatever you are using, have 
a copy of ALL of your documents. In which case you wouldn't need to make 
a backup of JUST your gnucash data provided that data lived in a 
directory included in that backup process.

Only if you are doing your backups each file individually do you need to 
worry which file is your gnucash data itself and which the interim log 
files created each time you do a save. Otherwise, you don't need to 
worry about that because the only cost to you is the space taken up by 
having made backups of what you don't need and that space is VERY cheap 
these days.

Michael D Novack