Storage::Dropbox (BROKEN)

Important: This feature no longer works, due to Dropbox closing down version 1 of their API. It will be removed in the next release of Backup. GitHub issue #838 has a discussion of this issue, and an unsupported patch to re-enable access to Dropbox with Backup version 4.

store_with Dropbox do |db|
  db.api_key     = "my_api_key"
  db.api_secret  = "my_api_secret"
  # Sets the path where the cached authorized session will be stored.
  # Relative paths will be relative to ~/Backup, unless the --root-path
  # is set on the command line or within your configuration file.
  db.cache_path  = ".cache"
  # :app_folder (default) or :dropbox
  db.access_type = :app_folder
  db.path        = "/path/to/my/backups"
  # Use a number or a Time object to specify how many backups to keep.
  db.keep        = 25
end

To use the Dropbox service as a backup storage, you need two things:

• A Dropbox Account (Get one for free here: dropbox.com)
• A Dropbox App (Create one for free here: developer.dropbox.com)

The default db.access_type is :app_folder. This is the default for Dropbox accounts. If you have contacted Dropbox and upgraded your account to Full Dropbox Access, then you will need to set the db.access_type to :dropbox.

Note: You must run your backup to Dropbox manually the first time to authorize your machine with your Dropbox account. When you manually run your backup, backup will provide you with a URL which you must visit with your browser. Once you’ve authorized your machine, Backup will write out the session to a cache file and from there on Backup will use the cache file and won’t prompt you to manually authorize, meaning you can run it in the background as normal using for example a Cron task.

Chunked Uploader

The Dropbox Storage uses Dropbox’s /chunked_upload API. By default, this will upload the final backup package file(s) in chunks of 4 MiB. If an error occurs while uploading a chunk, Backup will retry the failed chunk 10 times, pausing 30 seconds between retries. If you wish to customize these values, you can do so as follows:

store_with Dropbox do |db|
  db.chunk_size     = 4 # MiB
  db.max_retries    = 10
  db.retry_waitsec  = 30
end

Note: This has nothing to do with Backup’s Splitter. If you have a Splitter defined on your model using split_into_chunks_of, your final backup package will still be split into multiple files, and each of those files will be uploaded to Dropbox.