Q I have used various versions of GnuCash for years with no problem. However, using 2.0.2 on either the latest versions of Ubuntu or SUSE, on two occasions the Current Account folder has disappeared between saving the account and restarting it. On the first occasion, I went back to an earlier saved account and retyped my bank statements. This time I have lost 6/52 worth of data and will not retype the lost data. Is there any way of recovering the data and/or how can this be avoided in future? Clearly the program is unusable in its current state.
A My first response would be that I have been using GnuCash for years, and am currently using version 2.2.1, without seeing what you describe, which makes me think it is a problem specific to your setup, but that's not great consolation to you. Are you sure that your home filesystem has no errors? Running fsck on /home would be a prudent move. As far as recovering goes, GnuCash stores backups of the data and log files in its data directory; the data files are named AccountName. datestring.xac.
Find the most recent undamaged one and copy it to AccountName. Do not rename it, you want the backup to still be there if the account file is lost or corrupted again. These backup files are created each time you run GnuCash and could fill up your hard drive if you left them all there, so GnuCash will remove the oldest files after a configurable period. Set this in the General section of the Preferences window, a value of 0 means your backup files will never be deleted automatically. If there are no problems with your filesystem, it would be good to get to the bottom of this error (restoring from backups is not a real solution), so run GnuCash from a terminal and the next time it does this you should see some errors in the terminal output or the logfile.
Search the GnuCash mailing lists and bugzilla (both available via www.gnucash.org) for a similar problem, and file a bug report if you find none. The developers cannot fix this unless they know about it. It would be wise to try a newer version first: get GnuCash 2.2.x RPMs for SUSE from http://rpm.pbone.net.