File transfers

[John Ralls]

> On Oct 24, 2016, at 6:20 AM, gilloz via gnucash-user <gnucash-user at gnucash.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello:  I have a Desktop and a Laptop with the Linux Mint(LM) OS's installed.  My Laptop has LM 18 and my Desktop has LM 17.3 installed.  My Desktop has the GnuCash program installed.  My accounts are checking and saving accounts.  How would I go about transferring my GnuCash files from the LM 17.3 computer to the LM 18 Laptop?  I have no clue which file(s) to transfer to my LM 18 computer.  If you can't, can you direct me to a website where I can access this or any information that would help me?  File transfers in Windows using computers with Quicken is easy because all the information is located in one Q type file.  I don't see that trying to open any of the GnuCash files.  I also do not want to lose any of this data trying to figure out how to do this.  Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks

Depending on whether you use online banking, you have one file and one or two directories to copy: Your accounts file is obviously the file. It will have a bunch of backup and log files that you can copy or not as you prefer; GnuCash won't care if they're not there but you might find them useful if your main data file gets messed up. The certain directory is ~/.gnucash, where '~' means your home directory. Note the dot at the beginning of .gnucash.  If you use online banking then you'll also want to copy ~/.aqbanking, same meaning for '~' and same note about the dot at the front.

There are also  some preferences, stored via an operating system facility, that are not easy to copy. If you're sure you haven't changed any of the preferences from the default then you needn't worry about it. Otherwise the best way is to open GnuCash on both machines, select Edit>Prefences, and go through the tabs and make sure that the settings match. 

Regards,
John Ralls