[GNC] Difficulty in migrating Gnucash to second computer

[David Cousens]

Nic

The .gnucash directory only contains user meta data about your preferences
in using GnuCash and any stored reports etc. The section in the Books
subdirectory  is again only meta data and not the actual data file. The
actual data file will be somewhere else in your home directory where you
saved it when you first opend GnuCash on the first computer. If you created
a subdirectory for your gnucash datafile (recommended practice) that
subdirectory can have any name you give it but it will contain files of the
following formats:
<filename>.gnucash;
<filename.gnucash.<timestamp>.log;
<filename.gnucash.<timestamp>.gnucash;

There should be only one <filename>.gnucash file but there may be several of
the
<filename.gnucash.<timestamp>.log;
<filename.gnucash.<timestamp>.gnucash;
files with different values of the timestamp. These are log files and backup
files respectively created each time the program is opened. The timestamps
have a "yyyymmddhhmmss" format. You may also see files with a .LNK and .LCK
extension which are used to prevent the file being opened by more than one
user or more than one instance of the program accidentally.
If you can open the data file in GnuCash the <filename>.gnucash should be
displayed in the title bar. You can then search your home directory for
<filename>.gnucash to locate where it is stored in Nemo.

It is the contents of this directory that need to be copied to a new
machine. I use my accounts with several different users on two Linux Mint
computers and one Windows 10 box by storing them in a Dropbox accessible
from each account on each computer.

If you use customized reports and you want to migrate them or make them
available on more than one machine you should also copy the hidden .gnucash
directory if you are using a GnuCash version earlier than I think 2.6.19. In
a few late 2.6 and 2.7 versions and in all 3.x versions the metadata is
stored under $HOME/.local/share/gnucash  as explained in the wiki
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Configuration_Locations

Another alternative to using dropbox is to use a file synchronization
program like Unison which is available for Linux, Windows and Macs to
synchronize your data and configs on several machines. This however can
cause confusion as to which computer has the most up to date files on it
which is why I use the Dropbox for the datafile and only sync my user
preferences with Unison.

David Cousens




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David Cousens
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