[GNC] Configuration dilemma -- How best to share Gnucash between 2 users

[davidcousens49 at gmail.com]

John, 

I achieve this by keeping my GnuCash files in a Dropbox account accessible from
my desktop at home, my laptop while travelling and my wife's laptop.  I backup
to an NAS (full once a month with daily incrementals) which is in turn backed up
to an offsite online cloud storage and a local directory on the desktop once or
twice a week  Provided you respect the lockfile, no problems. It generally takes
no more than a minute or two to sync automatically between the two machines via
the Dropbox account (\ I'm on a broadband 100Mbps connection - may be a bit more
limited on slower connections). Just have to remember to exit GnuCash on the
desktop before going out with the laptop and vice versa. In my case only I work
on the files so there is no problem coordinating multiple users.

David Cousens

On Tue, 2022-05-10 at 14:06 -0600, John Griessen wrote:
> On 5/10/22 11:46, Chris Mitchell wrote:
> Keeping the data files on shared network storage ("Windows network
> share", Samba, NFS, sshfs, etc) and accessing them directly has the
> advantage of real-time file locking:
> > I much prefer this setup, because it effectively prevents the
> > "accidentally edit both" scenario.
> 
> That sounds great for two people in an office.   How would you get the benefit
> of doing bookkeeping on a laptop and then at a 
> desktop machine alternating
> back and forth?
> 
> I get a flexibility benefit using unison to sync files.  I don't share use of
> bookkeeping files
> with another person, just me with laptop and me with desktop.  So far no
> troubles for a year.
> This method does not expose my bookkeeping to internet server attacks either
> -- it all stays behind a firewall.
> 
> I've not used the lock files very much, usually "opening anyway" since there
> have been occasional lock ups of x-windows as the 
> ubuntu distro I run with has been shifting to Wayland, and sometimes I get to
> power off running processes and have stale lock 
> files to ignore.  And since there is only me, lock files are always wrong if
> they say locked, since I don't have both laptop and 
> desktop running gnucash at once.
> 
> I find it worth being careful not to edit two different .gnucash files so I
> can do some bookkeeping at odd hours with laptop, and 
> yet normally use desktop with scanner on my LAN for prcessing paper receipts
> to images.  There is a side benefit to using a sync 
> program methodically:  it's always making a backup of what your are doing by
> copying any newer files to the other machine.  Unison 
> syncs all my data, not just gnucash files.  If somehow unison garbled
> something, there are 30 older .gnucash files and every 
> single .log file saved in a dir called logs to reconstruct lost data entering
> from.
> 
> John Griessen
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