[SC.LUG] Distro Changes & Gnucash

[Matthew Tolley]

Hello all,



My apologies for being quiet of late - the energy efficiency business 
has been keeping me pretty busy recently.

As some of you know, I am not anywhere near as IT-literate as most of 
you, but since my belief in free / open source software is stronger than 
my fear of the command line, I made the switch from Windows to Ubuntu 
some years ago - it being the first distro that worked for my PC!

Last month I identified all the important directories in /home, 
including /home/Gnucash, and backed them up for the first time since 
August last year, and then installed Debian 64-bit, wiping out Ubuntu.

Sadly, Debian booted to a command line only, seemingly failing to 
recognise my graphics and network cards. A subsequent installation of 
Debian 32-bit achieved exactly the same result.

Regrettably, I do not have the IT skills to fix the problem, so after a 
brief flirtation with Fedora 10 (great security features, but the 
default bootloader failed to recognise the OS on my other Hard drive), I 
found myself feeling somewhat defeated and installing Ubuntu again.

Unfortunately, I had not been as thorough in backing up some of the 
/home directories as I thought. I had backed up /home/Gnucash, but not 
/home/.gnucash.

Oops.

I installed and opened Gnucash, and found that I now have no access to 
the last 12 years of financial records which I have been keeping. I felt 
a bit like a high street bank :-[ .

What I do have is a /home/.gnucash backup from August last year, but 
copying it into /home (merging with the directory which was already 
there) did not produce any visible data. All there is in /home/Gnucash 
is a bunch of .log and .xac files, plus a zipped file that I cannot 
presently extract. Gnucash has an option to 'replay' a .log file (not 
sure what that means), but again this did not produce any beneficial 
results.

So my question, after all that, is this... how can I recover the maximum 
amount of data into Gnucash (or similar)?

I would welcome all your thoughts on this!

Many thanks in advance,




Matthew