You are going to make a backup of your accounting data in a removable media from your office computer and store it at your home location. Your goal is to be able to restore your books of accounts, if your business computer is stolen or damaged entirely.
- Prerequisites: Please keep a USB flash drive handy to make a backup copy of files and folders.
- Find the directory where you created your books of accounts and find the main accounts file. In our case, the file we need is MACS (with the
.gnucashextension or without any file name extension). When viewed in Windows Explorer, it will appear as shown in the next screenshot. - Make a copy of this MACS file on your USB flash drive.
- Next, find your
Documents and Settingsfolder. Here you will find a folder with your username. Open this folder and you will find folders named.gconfand.gnucash, as shown in the next screenshot. - Copy these two folders also onto the USB flash drive.
- Take this USB flash drive with you when you go home.
How often should you backup your accounts? That depends. That depends on how much disruption your business can tolerate. That also depends on whether you have the stomach for putting in the extra work needed to recover from such a crisis. And quick enough so that your customers won't know about it and your business won't be impacted. If you are a superman or superwoman, who has all the source documents well organized and who can pull an all-nighter to catch up with transaction entries for a month, then you can afford to backup once a month. However, ordinary mortals, like you and me, should plan on more frequent backups.
Which files should you backup?
- Backup your main data files that contain the bookkeeping entries, for each book of accounts. In our case, the file is simply called
MACS(with the.gnucashextension or without any extension). Any time you're working and the MACS file is lost or corrupted, all you have to do is bring this file back and open it in GnuCash and you are back in business. Of course, you will have to redo any transactions that you entered since the last backup. However, now that we have agreed on taking frequent backups, there should not be much of that. - As we saw in the tutorial, Preferences are stored here at
C:Documents and Settings<User>.gconf. You should backup this directory as well. - Also, as we saw in the tutorial, custom reports, check formats, stylesheets, and so on are saved here at
C:Documents and Settings<User>.gnucash. You should backup this directory as well.
There are only two kinds of people in this world. Those who want to do things in their own sweet way and their own sweet time and those who believe, "Why should I bark when I have a dog for that very purpose?"
Depending upon which type of person you are, you might want to use Auto-save or not. If you belong to the latter type, you will make full use of the GnuCash built-in capability to auto save changes. In the Preferences dialog, in the General tab, make sure the Auto-save time interval setting in the Files pane is set to a number other than zero.
In the same Files pane of the General tab, the Retain log files setting will let you say for how long the backup files should be retained. However, there are some limitations to GnuCash backups. For one, this backup only takes care of the main account data files. This doesn't backup your preferences, custom report, check format, or stylesheets. Also, the backups are created in the same place as the main accounts file. If your hard disk crashes or, more likely, gets corrupted by a virus, you will lose all the backups along with the main files. So, to extend the above analogy, while GnuCash will do most of the barking, you have to do some. We recommend that you supplement the retain log files with the following steps, at a minimum:
- Move backups to another physical location frequently. For example, you can make a backup on a removable media such as a USB flash drive and take it home, as we saw in the tutorial. Alternatively, you can make a backup on a network drive or on one of the online storage services, if you use one.
- When you do the above, make backups of your
.gconfand.gnucashdirectories as well.
Let us see what happens when you do a manual save or auto-save kicks in. Each time a data file is saved, a backup copy will also be saved with the extension .gnucash. This backup file is a complete copy of your previous data file, and the filename format refers to the data file, year, month, day, and time of the backup. For example, the filename MACS.20101001203512.gnucash indicates this is a backup copy of the file MACS saved in the year 2010, Oct 1, at 8:35:12 p.m.
Note
In some older GnuCash documentation, you may see some references to replaying the .log files to recover transactions lost due to a crash or power failure. However, this is not recommended. The .log files do not serve any purpose and can be safely ignored.
If you have set the retention period to 30 days, GnuCash will automatically delete any .gnucash and .log files that are older than 30 days. If you want to keep the files for a longer or shorter period, you can change this in the GnuCash preferences.
Sometimes the loss or corruption of data may be self-inflicted. You may mess up the data accidentally or otherwise and find that it is easier to start over than try to unravel what you did. The backup files will come in handy in these instances as well.
To restore from a backup file, simply open the .gnucash file with the date and time to which you wish to return. After you open it, be sure to save this file under a different name.
GnuCash does not have a password protection feature. How can you protect your accounts data from being accessed by other people, if your computer is shared? There are two ways of protecting your files from being accessed by unauthorized users:
- Using the Operating System (OS) features: Windows XP, Vista, and 7 allow you to set up user accounts with password protection. For example, here is a tutorial on how to password protect Windows XP from eHow (http://www.ehow.com/how_6930539_password-protect-windows-xp.html). This way you can decide which files you want to share and which ones you do not. Also, you can give occasional users 'guest' access, so that they cannot view unauthorized files or damage files accidentally or otherwise.
- If you need more robust protection, you can look at third-party file system encryption solutions, including some open source ones such as TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org).
- What are the three things that should be backed up?
a. The
main accountsfile, thelogfile, and the.gnucashfile.b. The
logfile, the.gconffolder, and the.gnucashfolder.c. The
main accountsfile, the.gconffolder, and the.gnucashfolder.d. The
main accountsfile, thestylesheetfolder, and thecheck formatfolder.