[GNC] OneDrive and GnuCash

[Edward Doolittle]

I tried OneDrive with gc for a while. It worked until it didn’t. I’m still not sure what happened, but I think MS unilaterally decided to reorganize my OneDrive setup. Gc just did not like what it did and starting one day gc would not open the file.  I’m not sure what was wrong, and I couldn’t find out, because I don’t get the Windows file system at all (Unix guy here) and I just could not figure it out even with Google’s help. My hypothesis was that somewhere along the line something like a symlink was being used and gc didn’t like it.  But I still don’t have a clue, and I don’t need the aggravation, so I just moved my gc files out of OneDrive.

I’ve not (yet) had any problems with Office apps and OneDrive which led me to believe the problem is that gc accesses the Windows file system at too low a level, but I’m sorry, I just don’t have time these days to help debug this problem.

Aside from that, I was always sweating over race conditions.  Once a long time ago I lost some work because it wasn’t uploaded by OneDrive and then I force opened the file on another computer overriding the lock (bad habit cuz I had to do it fairly regularly).  The work was in the cloud somewhere but it was less trouble in that case for me to retype it.  So my fault, really, but I really really don’t need to expend a chunk of my brain mentally modelling the cloud sync and lock behaviour every time I use gc.

Other cloud file services might provide better warnings, and might allow you to wrap the call to gc in a test that will pop a warning until the file is up-to-date in the cloud.  Heck, OneDrive might provide such a wrapper too but I don’t know the system well enough.

One piece of advice for everyone: when transferring data from paper to gc, keep the paper with potentially unsynced data in a separate pile until you know it’s ok (for whatever sense of ok is relevant to you … cloud synced or hard drive synced or backed up to external hd, e.g.).  When you know it is synced or otherwise backed up, then file it.  In addition to losing data to the cloud issue described above, I’ve also lost data the old fashioned way (power failure on a desktop without battery backup), and both times I had more trouble than necessary re-running my transactions because I managed all those slips of paper poorly.

Edward
________________________________
From: gnucash-user <gnucash-user-bounces+edward.doolittle=gmail.com at gnucash.org> on behalf of David Carlson <david.carlson.417 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2022 12:52 PM
To: Gnucash Users
Subject: [GNC] OneDrive and GnuCash

Are there any GnuCash users that store their data files in One Drive?

Are there any issues slow response or keeping a few weeks of backup and log
files?
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