The data you enter into Grisbi must be carefully preserved and protected against accidental loss. Grisbi provides three tools to address this issue : Account file management, Backups and Archives.
You can set the following management options:
All of these options are explained in detail and can be configured in the Edit - Preferences menu (see 22.1.1, Managing Account Files).
In general, no matter what data you have on your computer’s hard drive, you need to make backups of it, for the simple reason that any data storage system has a limited lifetime. Making backups is designed to limit the risk of data loss.
Grisbi allows you to make automatic backups of your accounts file. These backups should be stored in a special directory or a special partition of your computer’s disk, with backups of all your other data, which would then allow you to easily back up this directory or partition, preferably on different types of media, independent of the computer, and put in a safe place.
Note: take these tips seriously and do not take risks with your data, this can save you many setbacks…
Grisbi can automatically save, in a directory to be defined, either a single backup file that is replaced regularly, or backup files that accumulate in this directory. The backup files have a name of the form name_of_file_YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS.gsb, where name_of_file is the name of your accounts file, YYYYMMDD is the date in year-month-days, T is a separator, and HHMMSS is the time in hours- minutes-seconds. This format is based on the ISO 8601 international date format, which permits, among other things, the automatic sorting in alphanumeric and chronological order in your backup directory.
Grisbi provides you the following backup options:
All of these options are described in detail and can be configured in the Edit - Preferences menu (see 22.1.1, Backups).
Entries inside an archive are no longer displayed and can no longer be processed, but are preserved. You can always unarchive an existing archive at any time to access its data.
When you use Grisbi, you enter transactions into your different accounts. These operations are all stored in the computer’s memory and hard disk, and a few of these are displayed on the screen. The display and processing of account entries consumes memory and microprocessor time.
As time goes by, there are more and more operations recorded, so their display and processing require more and more memory space and microprocessor time. Your computer (depending on its specification) will eventually start to run Grisbi more slowly.
To limit this loss of performance in the display and the processing, in particular in report generation or in the search for information, Grisbi prompts you to choose a portion of your entries and to put them in an archive, that is, to set them apart so that they are not affected by future postings or operation.
Archiving can be manual or automated. Grisbi considers that beyond three thousand operations in an account, the entries become too slow, so on the one hand it warns you if you exceed this number of transactions and prompts you to manually archive a section of them. Alternatively, it can let you archive these three thousand transactions by automatically launching an assistant.
Whether you do an archiving manually or with the assistant, the counting process is then reset and Grisbi will offer you the same thing again after three thousand additional operations.
The display of an archive appears at the top of the list of operations for each account, in the form of an operation line on a green background, indicating its date of creation, its name and its creation parameters. (dates and financial year or report name), as well as the number of archived operations for the account displayed, and the total number of transaction in your accounts file.
Figure 6.1: Archive line displayed
You can show or hide all archive rows in the list of operations for all accounts by selecting the View - Show Lines Archive, or by clicking the View tool on the toolbar, and then click selecting Show Archive Lines from its drop-down list.
If you want to view the operations inside an archive, you can open this archive by double-clicking on its line: after validation in the window that appears, the operations are displayed in the list.
Note: this is only an opening of the archive for display, and in no case this archive is deleted. The next time Grisbi is used, the green line of the archive will reappear at the top of the list for each account. For a true deletion of the archive, see the 6.3.6, Deleting an archive section.
To create an archive, follow these steps:
Figure 6.2: Creating an archive
Note: the last line in the window indicates either an error in entering these parameters, the number of transactions that will be archived and the total number of operations in your accounts file.
Note: In case Grisbi has become slower after creating an archive, you can configure it to not load the close operations (R) on startup, in order to increase its speed, see the 8.1, tool bar).
The archive appears at the very top of the list of operations for each account (see the 6.3.1 section, Archives in the list of transactions).
When a certain number of registered transactions is reached, Grisbi can first of all warn you that this quantity of operations has not yet been archived, on the other hand automatically start the creation of an archive (see 22.1.2, warning and automatic creation).
By clicking on the box labelled Automatically create an archive if necessary, you enable the automatic archiving function.
With the label Warn if more transactions … are not archived, you can set this number of operations. The default value is 3000.
You can consult the parameters that were defined during the creation of an archive, in the Edit - Preferences - Archives menu. For this see the 22.1.2, Existing Archives.
You can only change the name of an archive in the Edit - Preferences menu. For this see the 22.1.2, Edit the archive section.
You can delete an existing archive , in the menu Edit - Preferences menu. There are two separate delete functions: deleting an archive while retaining its transactions,and deleting an archive while deleting all its operations. For this see 22.1.2, Edit the archive.
Allows you to create a file containing the archive, in order to store it, or to use it in another Grisbi account file or in another accounting application. Exporting can only be done through GSB, QIF or CSV.
Caution: QIF and CSV file formats do not support currency, and all transactions will be converted to the currency of their respective account.
To export an archive, follow these steps: