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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#31339 Akeebackup connection to dropbox team folders

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Akeeba Backup version
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Latest post by yvesfb on Friday, 10 May 2019 11:57 CDT

yvesfb
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Description of my issue:
Hi,
I use the post processing of Akeeba backup to store the files on a Business dropbox.
It is working, but only by storing information on the folder related to my user account without the possibility to use Dropbox Team folder. (if I indicate an existing path of a Team folder, then the equivalent path is created inside the folder linked to my Business user account).
I contacted the Dropbox support about it and here below is their answer:
Thanks for writing in. It sounds like you’re referring to the path behavior when using a third party application. Dropbox does enable third party applications like this to upload to any desired path in the connected Dropbox account, and the particular path is chosen by the third party application when uploading files.

Based on what you've written, the app is defaulting to your "member" folder, but you want it to write to the "team space". This is possible, but the app will need to be written to support that.

Please reach out to the support organization for that third party application to request that they update the application to support this. (If the developers of this app are having any trouble with the Dropbox API itself, they can reach out to Dropbox developer support directly with the relevant technical details for help.)



Do you have any idea how I can chose the right folders (I would like to be able to share the backups within the team and not being obliged to supplementary file management after each backup).
Regards
yves

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
The problem is that there are separate endpoints for User and Business versions of Dropbox, see https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/teams

We would have to write a new integration with Dropbox, using the Business endpoints. Further to that, it would have to run in Team Admin mode which means that it can only upload to the team folders but not your personal files area. This is completely different to what most of our users expect.

On top of that, the process to get application approval is incompatible with a small company like ours releasing a mass distributed application like Akeeba Backup. By default, only up to 3 teams and 500 Dropbox users can be linked to the in-development version of the Dropbox application. Dropbox will only consider production status if at least 50 users have linked to it. However, there's only 4 of us. We are 46 people short. If we release our software with the Dropbox app still in-development the integration will simply not work which means that some people will flood us with support requests while most of them will simply think we're idiots and cannot write a correct integration. Neither of these sounds like a good way to go about business.

So, it's extremely unlikely that we can realistically implement support for the Business version of Dropbox even though from a coding point of view it's really not that much different than what we have right now.

What I recommend that you do is manually move the backups to the team folder as needed. This is what we were doing for that brief period of time we were using Dropbox for Business.

Ultimately, we found out that it's much easier using Amazon S3 and create read-only credentials to each backup repository (a path in an S3 bucket). We used that with CyberDuck and CloudBerry to provide a neat GUI to access said backups. Setting up credentials on Amazon took half an hour and from that point it was zero maintenance.

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!

yvesfb
Hi Nicholas,

Thank you for your feedback and info.
I understand your position. :-)

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