Dropbox backend is completely non-functional

Support
#1

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Dropbox backend is impossible to use right now because there is no way to get a proper refresh token.

As detailed in Dropbox: token expiring and not being refreshed, the Dropbox Token for Duplicacy page produces a short-lived authorization token, not a long-lived refresh token. The CLI tool expects a refresh token so this doesn’t work. There is no way for me to modify this to generate a refresh token because I don’t have Duplicacy’s client secret (the secret for the Duplicacy app on the Dropbox API).

The documentation Supported storage backends says that I can use my own Dropbox API app to generate a token. I can generate a refresh token in this way, but Duplicacy doesn’t accept it (I get “No access token returned”), probably because the API it’s hitting https://duplicacy.com/dropbox_refresh is using the Duplicacy app’s client ID and secret.

@gchen is there any workaround? Or is it impossible to use Dropbox with Duplicacy? @prestonhunt how were you able to get this working? Did you recompile Duplicacy and replace the dropbox_refresh API with your own endpoint?

#2

@Icydog I never did get it working. But then I closed my Dropbox account and moved to pCloud lifetime instead, so it’s a moot point for me :slight_smile: Good luck!

#3

You might want to search this and other forums for this, and get a refund while you can. It’s so cheap for a reason.

#4

THANK YOU @ondrej.machulda for the solution in Duplicacy Web Dropbox Issue - #29 by ondrej.machulda !

The secret is to use https://duplicacy.com/dropbox_start to get the key. This URL seems to only be mentioned in the commit message here: Use long-lived refresh token for the Dropbox backend · gilbertchen/duplicacy@cde660e · GitHub and cannot be found anywhere else.

This is NOT the https://duplicacy.com/dropbox_start.html URL mentioned in the documentation: Supported storage backends

So I guess the Dropbox backend has been unusable for five months because there was no way to generate the token unless you knew about this undocumented URL?

Updating the documentation would save a lot of frustration and wasted time.

2 Likes
#5

Thanks! I just wasted a lot of time today because of this. You made my day.

#6

And for the moment Duplicacy does not support PCloud, the API is not managed (Which is a shame, even if it is not the ultimate storage, it would still be much better than WebDEV support)