[GNC] Removing old transactions

[sunfish62 at yahoo.com]

I can imagine a few reasons, most notably because you want to track your finances over a longer time frame. Splitting the file by year makes that much more difficult. 

Moreover, I would imagine the manual entry of opening balances every year would get tiresome-- especially if you have large numbers of stock or mutual fund holdings. 

OTOH, GnuCash loads the entire file into memory on startup, so it's possible that a larger file could potentially slow down a system. I don't know whether my own file (19 years, 8Mb compressed) is slow because of this-- but it might be. 

⁣David T.​

On Dec 18, 2025, 2:10 PM, at 2:10 PM, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 12:05:50AM -0600, R Losey wrote:
>> I, too, wonder why one would want to delete some years; I have 9
>years of
>> GnuCash data and my save file is 2.8M -- in these days of terabyte
>drives,
>> that's pretty insignificant.
>> 
>Yes, but why keep it all in one file?  Much easier **conceptually**
>(for me anyway) to keep each year in a separate GnuCash database. 
>
>It also means that you can go to the files/database for a particular
>year and, without having to change dates or anything, you can look at
>that year's figures.
>
>-- 
>Chris Green
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