Migration Issue

Robert Burns rebburns at zoomtown.com
Sat Feb 6 17:30:22 EST 2016


Hi Guys,
Thanks for your previous suggestions. I am sorry to have to keep bothering you, but I am running into a problem. Before I read John Ralls comments I did the following.
I set up Dropbox on both computers. On the old computer the path to the accounts was C:\users\Robert Burns\.gnucash\books\. On the new computer it is C:\Users\REB\.gnucash\books. 
I used Dropbox to sync between the old computer with the original files and the new computer. Dropbox could not put the original accounts in the new path to \books so I had to manually copy the files on the new computer to the new \books location. Then when I started GnuCash on the new computer it first was looking for the old path and could not find the account file. I have no idea how it even new the old path. I manually opened the new \books location and tried to open the account in that location. I got the message "no suitable backend." In the light of John's comments I made the mistake of only putting the gcm accounts in \books in Dropbox. I did not put the whole~/.gnucash file in to Dropbox.  I am stumped. Do you have any suggestions as to how I can remedy this?
Thank you,
Bob Burns
-----Original Message-----
From: John Ralls [mailto:jralls at ceridwen.us] 
Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2016 10:37 AM
To: Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com>
Cc: Robert Burns <rebburns at zoomtown.com>; Gnucash Users <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
Subject: Re: Migration Issue


> 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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