Jens, “The standard expense categories and zero balances” sounds like you ran “File>New” and clicked through the New Account Hierarchy Assistant accepting all of the defaults. Do you have any accounts (we don’t call them categories in GnuCash) in the file with data that don’t come from the New Account Hierarchy Assistant? Are those accounts present (but empty) in the file with no data?
Was the file timestamped the 13th a backup or primary file? Was it in the same directory as the file from the 15th? When you mount the USB drives do they have different names in /Volumes or only on Finder’s sidebar? Regards, John Ralls > On Mar 5, 2026, at 14:46, Jens Ingemann Jensen <[email protected]> > wrote: > > David, > What I did was to take the USB stick on which I had saved the GNC file, > plugged it into my MacBook, and then opened GNC. It said it could not find > the usual file, so I went to "File" → "Open" clicked on the file on the > USB stick, and it opened a file with the standard expense categories and zero > balances and telling me it was "read only". Then I went back to my iMac and > now when I opened GNC the same happened. Both computers run GNC 5.1 > There was a second USB drive plugged into the iMac of which I had been > unaware, and it turned out that the files had been saved there too, but > trying to open them from there resulted in the same scenario. > This all happened on the 15th, and today I plugged in only the second USB > stick on my iMac, and I was able to find a file with a time stamp from the > 13th on this drive. I opened GNC and opened this file via the file menu. It > opened and came up with all the missing information. Miracle. The first USB > stick did not have any files with time stamps earlier than the 15th. Now I > am leary of trying again to run GNC on two computers, but I will try to copy > that good file onto a third USB stick and see if it will open on the MacBook. > I travel a bit, therefore the desire to run it on two computers, so I can > stay on top of my finances. > Even if I got my data back, I am still curious what I did wrong. > Thank you to everyone who has tried to help. > Jens > _______________________________________________ gnucash-user mailing list [email protected] To update your subscription preferences or to unsubscribe: https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-user ----- Please remember to CC this list on all your replies. You can do this by using Reply-To-List or Reply-All.
