No suitable backend was found for /Volumes/Secure/GnuCash2016/Personal2016.gnucash

[Eric Beversluis]

Eric Beversluis  
Short fiction at www.ericbeversluis.com

On September 28, 2017 at 12:17:20, John Ralls (jralls at ceridwen.us) wrote:
>  
> > On Sep 28, 2017, at 8:58 AM, Eric Beversluis wrote:  
> >
> > I’ve recently moved to Mac Sierra. Have been using GnuCash successfully there. This  
> morning when I opened gnucash I got this message:
> >
> > No suitable backend was found for /Volumes/Secure/GnuCash2016/Personal2016.gnucash  
> >
> > ??
> >
> > Only thing I can think is that I moved some older versions of my GnuCash files to trash.  
> Had several sitting in other places as a result of the move and of setting up the encrypted  
> image /Volumes/Secure.
> >
> > I seem to be able to open one of the backups, Personal2016.gnucash.20170927131325.gnucash.  
> But when I try to save it as Personal2016.gnucash, after having moved the original Personal2016.gnucash  
> to trash, I get the same “No suitable backend” error.
> >
> > Also strange: Mac or GnuCash or something is creating these two zero byte files:
> >
> > Personal2016.gnucash.20170927131325.gnucash.0.1139.LNK
> > Personal2016.gnucash.20170927131325.gnucash.LCK
> > ??
>  
> Those files are created by the xml backend. The LCK file is the lock file that the backend  
> uses to ensure that only one user is connected to the file at a time. The LNK file is part  
> of a hack to ensure that locking works on an old remote file protocol called NFS, for "network  
> file system".
>  
> If you save Personal2016.gnucash to a non-encrypted volume is GnuCash able to open it?  
> Does enabling or disabling compression in Preferences (General tab, middle of the page,  
> "Compress Files") make a difference?
>  
> Is /Volumes/Secure encrypted with File Vault or a third-party program?
>  
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>  
>  
If I save the backup to Desktop as Personal2016.gnucash, it opens.

If I ‘save as’ the open version to /Volumes/Secure/GnuCash2016/, it get the error. Even after disabling compression before the save as.

I tried saving to /Volumes/Secure/Gnucash2016/ as Gnucash2016_New.gnucash, but that generated the same error on opening.

If I try to copy the GnuCash2016_New.gnucash version to Desktop I get this error:

 "The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “GnuCash2016_New.gnucash” can’t be  read or written.
(Error code -36)”

But despite this warning, it copies something there with a size of 3.3MB, whereas the other files are all aboutl 254KB.

The wierd thing is that it seemed to be working OK until I moved the non-secure copies to Trash.

The secure partition (image?—not fully up on Mac jargon yet) was created with Disk Utility > New Image > Blank Image. Whether that uses File Vault I don’t know. I somehow thought File Vault encrypted the whole disk.