[GNC] Saving Gnucash data and back ups

[Michael or Penny Novack]

To what  Geoff wrote:

The problem is not how to back up you gnucash data. The problem is how 
to back up ALL of your user data. There are two fundamentally different 
approaches, incremental backup and total as of some date backup. The 
usual way to decide is the volume of data to be backed  up. whether 
there will be backup off site (a second copy), and the cost of backup 
medium.

Incremental takes takes space. For example, a job might run during 
shutdown that identifies all user files that have changed since last 
back up and copies them to the backup space (NOT on your main hard 
drive) keeping N versions. This would normally be to on site medium, so 
every so often a batch backup of this backup should be made to be taken 
off site. The difficulty is during "restore" to get the correct version 
<< after a mishap at one of the world's largest "financials" I got 
tasked with coming up with something so "never again" << it involved 
incorporating the julian date into the file name so would be uniquely 
identified in a way that -cycle letters, etc. are not >>

This is always a loss/risk calculation. Thus if you don't have a lot of 
data relative to your backup space you might prefer "batch" backups 
where a given backup copies ALL user data. You might make one daily, 
then monthly make a copy of the end of month, annually make an end of 
year (those you keep forever) << if you reuse the daily ones in the next 
month and the monthly ones the next year you only need about 50x the 
space --- so if you are backing up 20 gigs of user data an external 
terabyte drive would do (you might send a copy of the monthlies offsite) >>

Note that THIS method is easier than an incremental if you are restoring 
everything to a new machine.

Michael D Novack