[GNC] computer change and backup

[Stan Brown (using GC 4.14)]

On 2025-09-08 10:53, R Losey wrote:
> My only issue with DropBox and Cloud storage is that your financial data is
> available to others; what's to prevent some worker at DropBox from
> installing GnuCash, and then accessing your file and loading it?

Exactly. And what if Dropbox gets hit with a DDoS attack and you're
unable to access your own data? Or if the server goes down and it turns
out some nimrod forgot to turn on backups after system maintenance? And
the biggie: all these companies boast about how our security is their
top priority, but they all get hacked anyway. I'm sure you can think of
other scenarios, more or less likely and more or less serious.

Remember: "The 'Cloud' is just someone else's computer."

What I do to sync between computers is simple: I made a little batch
file that copies everything to a USB stick, and another that copies
everything from the USB stick to the computer the stick is plugged into.

The copy commands use the option to overwrite an older file with a newer
one, never vice versa, so I'm never in danger of losing recently entered
transactions, recently saved report configurations, or recently saved GC
window register layouts. At the same time, if I do some work after
running a copy from USB stick to computer, and realize I've messed
something up, recovery is easy because I have all those files on the USB
stick in their pre-messup state.

Since I'm on Windows, "everything" is
    my *.gnucash files
    the contents of %APPDATA%\GnuCash
    the System Registry data under the key
        HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\GSettings\org\gnucash\GnuCash.
It's exactly the stuff I would need when installing GC on a new computer.

The Wiki page <https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Configuration_Locations>
gives the locations for Windows, Linux, and Mac, for both current and
older GC versions.

Stan Brown
Tehachapi, CA, USA
https://BrownMath.com/