Migration Issue

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Sat Feb 6 10:36:49 EST 2016


> On Feb 6, 2016, at 1:13 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 5 February 2016 at 21:39, Robert Burns <rebburns at zoomtown.com> wrote:
>> Thanks you guys for your suggestions. I take it that since I am using the program for personal purposes I really don’t need the Gsettings prefs. Also, if I understand correctly by using Create Synchronicity and Dropbox I can avoid having to migrate from one computer to another. I already have a general backup program to back all my drives and files, but I guess I could use CS to separately backup and synchronize GnuCash on two separate computers, one of which also has a partition for Ubuntu 14.04. If so, can I avoid the migration from one computer to the other by synchronizing them?
>> 
>> Am I understanding you correctly?
> 
> Just to clarify a bit, unless you are doing something clever with
> customised reports or similar then the only file you need to move or
> synchronise between machines is the accounts file (myaccounts.gnucash
> or whatever you called it when you first saved it).

It doesn't need to be anything particularly clever with customized reports. If you have saved customizations at all or if you want to share the window positions or open tabs you probably want to move ~/.gnucash to your dropbox (or whatever) folder too. It doesn't need to be hidden, just use $GNC_DOT_DIR to tell GnuCash where it is.

We don't recommend that you keep your account files outside of your dropbox folder and copy in just the main file for two reasons: The main one is that you won't sync the lockfile that way and run the risk of updating the database differently in two versions of the file. That's a bear to fix. Dropbox itself doesn't sync immediately so it's not perfect protection but it is better than no syncing at all. The other is that unless you also sync the backup files you won't have complete rollback capability on either machine.

BTW, the settings stored in GSettings are those edited by Preferences and are more about customizing how GnuCash behaves than business stuff per se. Most of the business settings are edited in File>Properties and are saved in the account file. They're unfortunately not easy to sync between computers, especially on Windows, but OTOH are not frequently changed by most users either.

Regards,
John Ralls




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