[GNC] Trouble opening ancient files

[Matthew Forbis]

Just because I was curious and had time on my hands, some digging into git looks like the binary file support was removed sometime during the development of 2.2, so the 2.0 series looks to be the last version that would read the old binary files.  In case anyone is curious, here is the commit:

https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/commit/89f37371d94ffe02af99b27e3a0dd30981263550#diff-8a2fc856d7cef71a3ac47d2f08469ec3

Matt




On Tuesday, June 16, 2020, 09:23:25 AM CDT, Derek Atkins <derek at ihtfp.com> wrote: 





Hi,

Thomas Klausner <tk at giga.or.at> writes:

> Hi!
>
> I have been using gnucash for a very long time, and recently I tried
> opening some of my first files -- but couldn't. Many old files worked,
> but not these two and their related .xac files.
>
> I see two different symptoms.
>
> One file has an timestamp from 2002. I don't recognize the file
> format, it's a binary format, but gzip cannot unpack it
> The error I get from gnucash (3.10) is:
>
> "No suitable backend was found for /path/to/file."
>
> A hexdump of the file starts with:
>
> 00000000  00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 04  00 00 00 ab 00 08 00 00  |................|
> 00000010  00 09 41 75 73 67 61 62  65 6e 00 00 00 00 04 31  |..Ausgaben.....1|
> 00000020  30 30 00 00 00 00 01 00  00 00 00 01 00 00 00 00  |00..............|
> 00000030  04 46 52 46 00 00 00 00  01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.FRF............|
> 00000040  00 01 00 00 00 05 00 00  00 d6 00 08 00 00 00 06  |................|
> 00000050  45 73 73 65 6e 00 00 00  00 04 31 31 30 00 00 00  |Essen.....110...|

This looks like it might be a GnuCash 1.2 or 1.4 binary datafile.  The
ability to read those old binary files was removed more than a decade ago.

You'll need to import that using something probably as old (new?) as 1.6
in order to convert it to XML, but you'll probably need a very old OS in
order to build it.

[snip]
> Any suggestions on how to get versions of these files that could be
> opened by gnucash 3.10?

These later XML files are also relatively old.  My guess, you'll
probably need to start with 1.6 (or maybe even 1.4 for the binary data)
and then keep on doing File -> Open /  File -> Save As to translate the
data files from version to version:

1.4 -> 1.6 -> 1.8 (was there a 1.8?  I don't recall) -> 2.0 -> 2.2 ->
2.4 -> 2.6 -> 3.x

Expect this to take a while.

> Thank you,
>  Thomas

> Please remember to CC this list on all your replies.
> You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.

-derek

-- 
      Derek Atkins                617-623-3745
      derek at ihtfp.com            www.ihtfp.com
      Computer and Internet Security Consultant

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