Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Sunday, 26 February 2012 05:30 CST

user29474

Mandatory information about my setup:

Have I read the related troubleshooter articles above before posting (which pages?)? Yes
Have I searched the tickets before posting? Yes
Have I read the documentation before posting (which pages?)? No
Joomla! version: 1.5.25
PHP version: Various
MySQL version: Various
Host: Varies
Akeeba Backup version: 3.3.13

Description of my issue:

I have three sites on two different hosts, and a couple of days ago the cron backups of just two of those sites (each on a different host) started to fail to upload the archive to Dropbox - see attached warnings from the backup log. The third site was unaffected.

After some tinkering and head-scratching, I realised that the common factor is the dropbox account. The two sites with this issue use the same Dropbox account, which a couple of days ago was affected by a Dropbox upgrade and now uses dropbox2.com with its new "improved" interface.

The third, unaffected site uses an account which is still on the old Dropbox interface at dropbox.com, though how long this will be the case I don't know.

For now I have switched all three to upload to the "working" dropbox account, but it can only be a matter of time before that gets the Dropbox upgrade treatment, at which point I expect the upload to break again.

Thanks,
Tim

Sunday, 26 February 2012 05:40 CST

nicholas

Are you sure you are not being hacked by means of DNS poisoning? A whois search shows me that the owner of dropbox2.com is an undisclosed New Zealand company, whereas the owner of DropBox.com is, well, DropBox, a US company with an address and a phone number displayed. Visiting dropbox2.com ends up in a pretty much empty page, without SSL protection. In fact, the domain is parked. Furthermore, there is absoltuely no reference to an account upgrade or improved interface in DropBox' website. So, I have to conclude that you are somehow being hacked.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Sunday, 26 February 2012 05:46 CST

user29474

Sorry, typographical error on my part: what I meant to type was www2.dropbox.com.

Sunday, 26 February 2012 05:50 CST

user29474

There is some discussion of www2 on the dropbox forums. :)

Sunday, 26 February 2012 06:38 CST

nicholas

Hm, I can see what's going on. First, let me tell you how the DropBox integration works and why. The only API officially available by DropBox is one which uses OAuth. It has two major shortfalls:

It requires a secret application key to be distributed with the application. For web services and closed source applications that's OK, but for Open Source software it's not possible, as it would mean that anyone could "lift" the secret key and create a rogue script to access your DropBox storage, posing as Akeeba Backup.
The contents of each file sent to DropBox have to be read and a signature created out of them. This would imply that the part size for split archives should be in the area of 512Kb to 2Mb, otherwise you'd end up with PHP memory outage errors. On top of that, the signing takes a LOT of time, causing timeout issues.

As a result using the official API for the purpose of transferring backup archives is impractical and insecure. Therefore, I had to go sideways and create a "hack-ish" solution. What our engine does is log in to your DropBox account (as if you were using a browser) and try to extract some tokens. Then it uses those tokens with DropBox' web upload method to upload the large backup archive parts to DropBox (upper limit: 50Mb). Since they undergo a redesign, this method stopped working.

All I can promise you is that once my own DropBox accounts are upgraded, I will take a look at the implementation and try to update it. If this is not possible, I will remove DropBox support.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 07 March 2012 07:02 CST

user29474

This is working now after updating to 3.4.1.

Thanks for your help. Keep up the good work.

Wednesday, 07 March 2012 07:04 CST

nicholas

You're welcome!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 06 April 2012 18:00 CDT

System Task

system

This ticket has been automatically closed. All tickets which have been inactive for a long time are automatically closed. If you believe that this ticket was closed in error, please contact us.

Edited by on 2012-04-06 18:00 CDT

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