Hi!

When I've recently tried to open my finances stored in my_finances.kmy Kmymoney claimed that it didn't exist - and it was right! When I had a closer look I recognized that the file had transformed into a folder my_finances. Inside that folder I found two files with cryptic names and the endings .cfa and .pek respectively. Besides these files I found several short rendered video files that I had recently worked with in Adobe Premiere. So for any reason that is totally obscure to me, Premiere has obviously destroyed my my_finances.kmy file.

Now for anyone who may ask how I run Premiere and Kmymoney on the same system: I have a data partition that is shared by Ubuntu and Windows.

Do you see any chance to recover my data? I hope that maybe Premiere just added data to the my_finances.kmy archive. Do those .cfa and .pek files mean anything?

When I try to open these files with Kmymoney it says that it was some old binary format - but it tells me the same thing no matter what file I try to open (except kmy files, of course).

I know that my chances are nearly zero to get anything back, but I just had to tell that crazy thing to someone, because I just don't get what has happend here. I didn't try to open the kmy file with Premiere or something like that. Besides that I had two different kmy files in the same folder of which only one has been destroyed. It just doesn't make sense to me. Do you have any ideas?

Looking forward to your answers,
David

edit: I just noticed that my lost file did not have the suffix .kmy. It had no suffix. This makes it even more strange, I think.

The kmy file format is actually a gzipped xml file so that means that running

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zcat any_file.kmy

in a terminal would output an xml text containing your financial data. You can try that command on any file and if you see an xml with accounts, transactions and so on then that is you kmymoney file.

Thanks for the hint, but the data seems to be lost. It's so annoying...

I suppose zcat did not get you anywhere? .pek and .cpa are Premiere files, cf. http://filext.com/file-extension/PEK. I doubt they contain your kmy data. One thing you can try to see what is in an unknown file is to apply the 'strings' command. If it's a big file, pipe it through 'more' so you can easily quit:

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strings my_file | more

You would not see much for binary files, and nothing at all for compressed or encrypted files of course.

Good idea, unfortunately not successful. The files don't seem to conatin any kmy data

'file' is also a good tool to check filetypes.

The same thing happend again. This time, all of a sudden my kmy file has lost its extension and now contains some arbitrary pdf file that I have downloaded and saved recently. The original data is obviously lost.

I can't imagine that I ovrwrote the kmy file accidentaly because the beforementioned pdf file does still exist at its original location under its original name.

This is the Output of the list command of my (former) kmy file:

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-rwxrwxrwx 2 david david 48279 2011-03-23 22:05 Meine_Finanzen_2011

This tells me that there are two hardlinks pointing to the file. And indeed the stat command tells me that both the original pdf file and the kmy file have the same inode.

Now I think there may be something wrong with my OS (Ubuntu 10.04, Gnome desktop) or filesystem (ext3)? I have never before observed such a behaviour on my system. Do you have any ideas what is going on here?