[GNC] Can't open old GnuCash file

[Tommy Trussell]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 7:01 PM MegaBrutal <megabrutal at gmail.com> wrote:

>  my old GnuCash
> file, untouched since 2017-09-21. To my shock, the modern GnuCash
> version that comes with my distro (Ubuntu 23.10) crashes when I try to
> open my old file.

...


> Maybe I was wrong that I expected some backward compatibility that
> modern versions are capable of performing incremental updates to old
> files to update it to the current file format... What to do now? Any
> suggestions?
>

I might be wrong, but I would expect even an old old file would not crash
the program!

First of all, I hope you made a backup of the entire data directory and put
it aside.

Second, make sure you are opening the DATA file and not one of the .log or
backup files (backups include a string of digits indicating the date and
time the backup was saved).

Do you remember if you saved it using the default xml data format, or could
you have possibly saved it as a sqlite database? I imagine you might not
remember. It is possible you haven't installed the libdbd-sqlite3 package
GnuCash needs to read sqlite. That is an easy fix and worth trying (because
it won't affect anything if it's not needed).

Could you try opening a terminal and launching gnucash there and seeing if
you get a more helpful error message?

P.S.: You are extremely likely to be able to read the old file, but it may
require a bit of help, so let us know by reporting back to the list.



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