Installation

[Adrien Monteleone]

Accessible? Sure. Always visible in the same location as their regular file mixed in? This seems to be a source of confusion. I have yet to encounter any other piece of software I can think of that operates this way. I’ve been using computers for several decades. My memory could be failing me, but I don’t recall this behavior elsewhere and I’ve never had an issue recovering data unless I was careless enough not to have a backup stored somewhere else.

The way Gnucash works right now would be somewhat analogous to a word processor saving file states every 5 minutes or so with a special extension. When you look in your documents directory you’d see dozens or more files with similar names, only one being the current ‘complete’ file you are looking for. Now, multiply that by 100s of files. Perhaps it isn’t so bad for those with one file, but one file is certainly not the only use case.

If what you say is the case, why do *nix distributions have an entirely separate /var/log tree instead of just piling everything into your file's working directory? Windows has a similar setup with their Application Data tree.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 13, 2018, at 1:59 AM, David T. <sunfish62 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Adrien, 
> 
> Log files have to be visible to the user, so that when they have to recover from an error state in their files, they can use them to restore. 
> 
> David
> 
> 
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 9:05, Adrien Monteleone
> <adrien.monteleone at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would seem to me the ‘cleaner’ option to store the log and lock files in some data directory like ".gnucash" "\Application Data\Gnucash" or "~/Library/Application Support/Gnucash" (or otherwise as per the OS recommendations) than have everything lumped together. Then, the user can store their book in whatever place they like and not have other files the app needs lying about to clutter their vision or aid to their confusion.
> 
> Certainly other needed files like reports, user prefs and the like are handled this way. I never did grasp why the log and lock files weren’t.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> > On Feb 12, 2018, at 10:45 AM, David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Michael,
> > 
> > I agree that the backup scheme should be as idiot proof as possible.
> > 
> > However, one reason (of several) that I personally am not using a cloud
> > service yet is that I do not see how the cloud would handle all all those
> > log files coming and going and data files being renamed every few minutes.
> > 
> > Also, ordinary users get lost if they browse the folder looking for a data
> > file.
> > 
> > Perhaps a simple (?) scheme of putting backup s in a sub folder named
> > filename_backup or similar might help with these issues, even if it adds
> > overhead to move files around.
> > 
> > I think the developer s are considering relocating backups in the 3.0
> > release do this is a good time to discuss this.
> > 
> > Sorry my tablet just decided that I nrrdrf a smaller keyboard.
> > 
> > David
> > 
> > On Feb 12, 2018 9:49 AM, "Mike or Penny Novack" <
> > stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> On 2/12/2018 10:08 AM, David Carlson wrote:
> >> 
> >> Johnathan,
> >> 
> >> GnuCash may or may not play well with various cloud storage services
> >> because of it's insistence (in current releases) on keeping it's automatic
> >> backups in the same folder as the data file.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Just so understood why it makes sense (to me)  to "insist" the automatic
> >> backups go into the same directory as the file. It guarantees gnucash being
> >> able to make up a UNIQUE name for the backups. If you were allowed to
> >> specify a directory B  in which to put the automatic backups for
> >> books.gnucash in directory A, what prevents directory B from also
> >> containing  a file named books.gnucash ?
> >> 
> >> Yes of course, care by the user could prevent a disaster like that, but as
> >> somebody who used to get paid to unscramble messes caused by that sort of
> >> carelessness, absolute prevention is better.
> >> 
> >> Michael D Novack
> >> 
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