Gramps was working on the file for over 2 hours without displaying it. I gave up on it and closed Gramps but it kept running without the gui until sent SIGHUP.
No logging occurred. No errors came up.
I am reluctant to try this again. I had to reboot after stopping Gramps because other, unrelated things, stopped working.
Are there external tools to work with Gramps data packages and files? Such as analysing and repairing data files, packages and archives, and for upgrading them?
The Gramps gpkg backup file contains the Gramps XML backup and all media files in a zipped format so you should be able to open the gpkg file with ark or unzip of fileroller etc Then see if you can import (Gramps XML) *.gramps file by itself?
It would be interesting to know why Gramps cannot extract the files
automatically?
Gramps 5.1.3 is unsupported and the last release in the 5.1.x series was 5.1.6; but looking at the release notes does not show anything you describe?
Maybe consider upgrading Gramps to the current 5.2.3 version or testing on another PC with ?
With the extracted Gramps xml file you could validate it as described on the Gramps XML page or use the standalone Betty to test generate a static website from Gramps XML file.
On Linux, the easiest way to see what’s in it, is to create a copy, and change the extension to .gz, so that you can read it with gunzip, or whatever archive manager you have at your disposal. I’m using LMDE 6, which is based on Debian 12, but not the same, so I can’t give you the name of the archive manager that you have.
You can also use the file command to check what it is, and that recognizes the gzip format no matter the extension.
The archive manager can also inform you about the archive integrity.
This is a good approach. The data.gramps that will be inside the the .gpkg compressed archive should import quickly. It is restoring all the media files, in the folder structure and compares that take forever.
So extracting it from the archive and importing the data.gramps is a good approach. And if this archive is on a different computer, you can extract the media files to a folder will be faster too. You’ll have to use one of the media tools in Gramps to resolve the new path locations.
Thanks for the helpful replies. I did not want to do anything more with the files without understanding them. Thanks for helping me understand them.
The debian version of 5.1.3 never emitted errors, never generated a log. This is the debian stable version for Bookworm. Of course, Debian rarely, if ever, uses the latest stable releases of apps.
I installed the 5.2.3 flatpak and tried again.
Using the flatpak, it failed. I eventually found the original GEDCOM file it was imported from and used that. it has at least 126K individuals in it. There are no media attached.
The data.gramps file in the gpkg could not be loaded. gramps complains that it is corrupt. This happened with all the copies of it.
the python libraries for debian bookworm have had a lot of changes. the debian version of gramps has not been updated recently. this may have caused gtramps to have problems.
in such cases, i would use flatpaks or appimages instead. It is what I do with libreoffice, because there are big problems with the debian versions.