[GNC] Trouble opening ancient files

[Adrien Monteleone]

I’d suspect if you walked a bit more slowly through the versions, you wouldn’t get that message, but I can’t say that with certainty. Maybe the Tracefile has more info. (see the wiki about finding the Tracefile on your system)

So you might have to step back from the original copy through the 2.x series.

Back then, each ‘x’ was a fairly major release. 2.0 --> 2.2 is more analogous to 2.x --> 3.x than to 3.0 --> 3.1 (The devs moved from a major.minor.bugfix number scheme to an major.minor_and_bugfix scheme

If you don’t go through the steps in order as recommended, you might not get certain file conversions along the way. You might be able to skip *some* ‘bugfix’ releases, but you might still have to step through each ‘minor’ release.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Jun 16, 2020 w25d168, at 12:50 PM, Thomas Klausner <tk at giga.or.at> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 10:22:33AM -0400, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Ok, I didn't find such an old binary.
> 
> Does anyone still have such a binary running, or a Windows 2.0.x exe somewhere?
> 
>> [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.
> 
> Actually, this quite a bit easier than I expected. I downloaded the
> Windows 2.2.9 binary and opened the newer file and saved it, then 3.10
> could open it successfully. :)
> 
> Can you please fix this warning:
> 
> "This file/URL appears to be from a newer version of GnuCash. You must upgrade your version of GnuCash to work with this data."
> 
> that appeared for this file?
> 
> Thanks,
> Thomas