[GNC] Recommendations for hosting gnucash file - Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Local server?

[Kalpesh Patel]

If your data is valuable enough to protect it, which goes without saying for financial (or any?) data, with a backup then don’t "plug in a USB drive" in back of your router and store it there! Those USB port(s) are great for sharing multi-function printers... and that’s about it!

The security of it gets a least amount of cycles and they are fairly trivial to break into those so called IoT features of it.  If you going to do so then do so with an investment of a proper NAS device that can connect via network on the back of the router's network port as financial data should afford the highest level of security facility. At minimum you should be encrypting data files that is going to resting on those plugged in USB drives (and on the NAS devices). By having a proper NAS devices, you will have at least two layers of defense, and adding encryption will make it three, against attacks.

You can use open source tool like CryptSync to in most part automate "copying" part of  the process.

-----Original Message-----
From: R Losey <rlosey at gmail.com> 
Sent: Saturday, September 07, 2024 12:09 PM
To: Bruce Griffis <bruce.griffis at gmail.com>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] Recommendations for hosting gnucash file - Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Local server?

On Sat, Sep 7, 2024 at 8:57 AM Bruce Griffis <bruce.griffis at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I am running GnuCash 5.5 on my Ubuntu 24.04 desktop. I also have 
> GnuCash installed on my Windows 11 laptop. Right now I just copy my 
> most recent GnuCash file over to USB if I want to work on it using my 
> laptop. I tried using Google Drive, but found the application hanging 
> when using Google Drive under Ubuntu. Not sure if it is because my 
> connection is too slow (1 Gig to my Cisco switch, 1 Gig to my router, 
> 100 Megs across my carrier) or if Ubuntu has timing issues with Google 
> Drive. I also have a subscription to Microsoft 365 and my Windows backups go there.
> Ubuntu backups go to an attached USB drive. althouhg I'm considering 
> cloud storage for Ubuntu as well.  I've read that Ubuntu 24.04 
> supports Microsoft drive, but you may need to log in whenever you 
> access the drive. Only reason I'd consider it is that my Microsoft 
> subscription comes with a decent amount of cloud storage. Finally, I 
> have a spare desktop under my desk I could fire up as a headless 
> server. And I have an older Raspberry PI I could probably turn into a 
> NAS and share it locally using Samba.
>
> What is the current recommendation for sharing GnuCash across multiple 
> PCs when it will be one user? I don't want to get too tricky. Heck, I 
> could probably just share my desktop's drive locally for a low tech 
> solution.
>

In considering a solution, there are a couple of things to consider: One is your particular setup, and the other is the issue of backups.

For example, most modern routers have a place to plug in a USB drive, and that can be made available over your home network. It would be a reasonable solution... but you would have to make sure that the data is backed up.

I have a NAS and I keep my GnuCash data there. The NAS is a "mirror" setup, so two copies of the data are maintained -- both drives would have to fail in order to lose the data... plus, I regularly back up the NAS. I run GnuCash from MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu (mostly Mac and Windows), and I've not had a problem using the NAS.

I would have thought that cloud storage would work, too -- perhaps it's just Microsoft 365's service? The other issue with cloud storage is privacy
- how confident are you that your financial data will remain private?  All it takes is one bad employee of the cloud company to examine your data.  I don't like to put data like this in the cloud.

Copying the data is okay, but you have to remember to never forget to do the copy... just one slip, and you've lost data.

Just some thoughts of mine.

_________________________________
Richard Losey
rlosey at gmail.com
Micah 6:8