Token/OAuth Access If Duplicacy Abandoned

[jnkmail11]

Apologies if this is a dumb question as I don’t understand how OAuth/token credentials work, but I’m concerned about maintaining access to my backup years from now even if for some reason Duplicacy is abandoned. If I hold onto the downloaded Google Drive json token file, is that all I will need in the future to allow a different system to use the duplicacy cli executable to restore my backups or is there some interaction between duplicacy.com and Google Drive that could fail and prevent this (like a token refresh?) if duplicacy.com were no longer around? It seems like people consider the service account credential file to be more reliable or secure and I’m not sure why

[saspus]

If you can access your data on Google drive you can download or mount it with any other tool and configure duplicacy to use it as a local storage to restore.

[jnkmail11]

Thanks for the response. So, the CLI could stop working in this hypothetical case unless I take the steps you mention? Mounting could work – didn’t know google drive could do that. Downloading isn’t a great option because I just had to migrate the backup to a different account and Google Takeout for some reason didn’t include a whole bunch of chunks, which seems to be a known issue.

[fronesis]

@jnkmail11

If I hold onto the downloaded Google Drive json token file, is that all I will need in the future to allow a different system to use the duplicacy cli executable to restore my backups or is there some interaction between duplicacy.com and Google Drive that could fail and prevent this (like a token refresh?) if duplicacy.com were no longer around?

I think the key points are that in order to backup to or restore from google drive, you’ll need two things:

1. Your encryption password (if you set encryption).
2. SOME way to access the google drive files so that you can run duplicacy init from the CLI and connect to your google drive storage directory.

Only #1 is unique to your current setup.

For #2 you have tons of options.
In addition to mounting the google drive (say, through clone) or downloading the files to local storage, you should be able to connect the duplicacy CLI to your google drive, as a remote cloud even if duplicacy.com is gone. You won’t be able to use the custom OAuth setup, but you should be able to set up the service account and download a json key file that way.

I’m not using google drive but I’m using Google Cloud Storage with a service account key, and I’m not dependent on the duplicacy website for access to GCS. I can always create a new service account key and use that to re-establish the link between a duplicacy repo and the cloud storage.