Gnucash file is getting long!

[David Carlson]

I think that John Ogden has a valid question which should be covered better
somewhere in the manual.

The short answer, unfortunately, is that there is no way to split out old
data to shrink the data file.  Also, it is a fact that eventually your file
may grow to the point where it taxes your computers' resources in one way
or another, possibly hogging RAM  or loading and saving slooooowly.

It is not easy to design a routine to split a file because there are many
cases of reports that would fail to give accurate results for some users if
old data was removed.  The most obvious would be capital gains for sales of
stocks, but there are probably other things that could break.

Various other users have found ways to work around this shortcoming for
their individual use.  It would be nice to hear from some of them and to
include them in the help literature as well.

My solution so far has been to buy a more powerful computer and use
Ethernet instead of WiFi to attach to the data file.  Yes, a file save
through WiFi takes well over a minute for my data file which is now over
6MB compressed.


David C

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 5:05 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

> What do you mean by 'quite large'? I have 15 years of (personal) data
> in mine and would not split it unless force to. It is great to be able
> to so easily look back to see when and where I bought the dishwasher
> (or whatever) and how much it cost. Mine is1.9 MBytes (compressed
> xml).
>
> Colin
>
> On 14 June 2017 at 10:45, JOHN OGDEN <john.ogden4 at btopenworld.com> wrote:
> > I have been using GnuCash for over four years, and the file is becoming
> quite large.I have searched the documentation but have failed to find any
> instructions for separating the GnuCash accounts file (for all accounts) so
> that I end up with two files, one for 'old' transactions and one for 'new'
> transactions. I assume this to be a standard 'end-of-accounting-period'
> action: where do I find it documented? John
> > Revd Dr John Ogden 0118 969 6319 07746 621447
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