Help files

L. D. James ljames at apollo3.com
Fri Jul 3 23:11:07 EDT 2015


On 07/03/2015 10:52 PM, James wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I too installed 2.6.7 over 2.6.5.  I get the same unable to find help files that the others are getting.  I am afraid to uninstall the 2.6.7 program for fear of losing nine months of data.
>
> James Fuller

Hi, James.  It might have been more convenient to the community if you 
had replied to the on going thread about the help files.  Some others 
who are following the thread might benefit from your experience and this 
reply I'm giving you.

I understand your concern for losing your data.  There are many safe 
guards that are provided by Gnucash that will keep your data safer 
between application installs that you might imagine.

First if you look into the directory where you have your "single" data 
file stored, you'll notice there are many files with the "*.gnucash" 
extension.  Those are backup files.  So if one of your files gets 
corrupted for some reason, then you can always load one of your recent 
backup files from that directory and have your data the way it was 
previously saved.

Also, your data file is all contained in a singer file (just like a work 
processor document).  I would recommend that you periodically backup 
that single file and keep it in a safe place.  I have seen too many 
times where a hard drive dies and a person loose a lot of precious 
data.  A drive will die on everyone at some time in their computer 
history, if they use a computer enough times.  It might be a flash drive 
a sdcard in one of your devices, but sooner or later one of your drives 
is going to die and you won't easily be able to get your files back from 
it.  So having backups will minimize your lost when this happens.

Also, please keep in mind that Gnucash, just like Microsoft word, will 
not search out your hard drive and remove all your personal files when 
you uninstall it or reinstall it.  Microsoft Word will install it's 
program in a place on your hard drive that is separate from where you 
actually keep your word documents.

So, it's important that you pay attention to where you are saving your 
accounting data so that you will know which folders needs to be backed 
up.  The removal of Gnucash will not touch that folder.

Finally, just to be sure, just backup your single data file which has 
all your months of work in it, then consider the complete removal and 
fresh install.  You'll find that it won't hurt anything.  Once you have 
installed Gnucash, you can open up any of your data files just by 
clicking on the desired data file, or, or course starting Gnucash and it 
will automatically remember your recent file loaded.

Hope that helped.

-- L. James

-- 
L. D. James
ljames at apollo3.com
www.apollo3.com/~ljames


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