[GNC] Removing old transactions

[Kalpesh Patel]

Mine is going back to 1991 and it is 4.3MB compressed (~66MB uncompressed) and it opens up in snap. I'll caveat that I migrated a lot of data from Quicken 2017 in 2020 and probably somewhat reduced then (truncated bank and credit card accounts) but bulk of it was carried forward into GNC. That size is based on religiously keeping books up to date for every nuances.


-----Original Message-----
From: R Losey <rlosey at gmail.com> 
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2025 1:06 AM
To: Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) <stan+gc at fastmail.fm>
Cc: gnucash-user at gnucash.org
Subject: Re: [GNC] Removing old transactions

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.

On Wed, Dec 17, 2025 at 6:12 PM Stan Brown (using GC 4.14) <
stan+gc at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> On 2025-12-17 12:16, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> > That is doable, but for the amount of effort required, is there some 
> > overriding *need* to do so? (I have over a decade of transactions 
> > and GnuCash does not care)
>
> Indeed, I wondered about that too. The file is compressed, so deleting 
> 40% of it is unlikely to save anywhere close to a megabyte. And GC is 
> peppy at opening and saving, so the shortened file is unlikely to open 
> or save noticeably faster.
>
> An argument against doing the deletions is the need to create manual 
> transactions for opening balances of assets, liabilities, and 
> equities, as you noted. (I'm assuming the questioner's income and 
> expenses have zero balances at the beginning of a year.)
>
> Stan Brown
> Tehachapi, CA, USA
> https://BrownMath.com
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--
_________________________________
Richard Losey
rlosey at gmail.com
Micah 6:8