I can imagine a few reasons, most notably because you want to track your finances over a longer time frame. Splitting the file by year makes that much more difficult.
Moreover, I would imagine the manual entry of opening balances every year would get tiresome-- especially if you have large numbers of stock or mutual fund holdings. OTOH, GnuCash loads the entire file into memory on startup, so it's possible that a larger file could potentially slow down a system. I don't know whether my own file (19 years, 8Mb compressed) is slow because of this-- but it might be. David T. On Dec 18, 2025, 2:10 PM, at 2:10 PM, Chris Green <[email protected]> wrote: >On Thu, Dec 18, 2025 at 12:05:50AM -0600, R Losey wrote: >> I, too, wonder why one would want to delete some years; I have 9 >years of >> GnuCash data and my save file is 2.8M -- in these days of terabyte >drives, >> that's pretty insignificant. >> >Yes, but why keep it all in one file? Much easier **conceptually** >(for me anyway) to keep each year in a separate GnuCash database. > >It also means that you can go to the files/database for a particular >year and, without having to change dates or anything, you can look at >that year's figures. > >-- >Chris Green >_______________________________________________ >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. _______________________________________________ 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.
