I have just altered backup settings to copy to Dropbox rather than email me. I followed the links from the backup page and then I was asked about creating access for receipts, which I initially declined as I wasn’t doing receipts, I was doing backups. This obviously cancels the whole integration.
Once you have confirmed the above the backups are then placed in the Apps > Quick File Receipts folder, when it should really be in Apps > Quick File Backups, or there should be Apps > Quick File containing Receipts and Backups. The Dropbox integration should then only need to ask for access to Apps > Quick File which would not lead to the UI confusion when linking accounts.
I appreciate this probably stems from expanding and changing what the integration initially did but I like a tidy folder structure and it is unlikely I will be able to sleep properly knowing my backups are in the receipts folder!
Part of the problem here stems from the name of our App on Dropbox being registered as “QuickFile Receipts”. Later we extended the capabilities of the app to archive backups. In retrospect we should have just named it “QuickFile”.
Dropbox also use the name of the app as the dedicated folder for all associated activity. I think we’d first need to look at renaming the app with Dropbox, however I don’t know if this will be possible as potentially it would then need to rename the folder for all attached clients.
I will certainly enquire to see if renaming the application with Dropbox is possible and let you know.
EDIT:
It seemed to allow the folder to be renamed. So when connecting to Dropbox now it should look like this:
I think we’d still need to look at our own UI just before you go into Dropbox to update some references.
EDIT 2:
We’ve reverted this actually as we don’t know for sure that it will not break our existing code. We’ll have another look shortly.
The server that runs our scheduling system updated itself earlier today and did not bring the service back online. Hence Dropbox and some other routine tasks were not running.
We’ve just manually restarted this so it should be fine as of now. Any files in Dropbox should sync in the next 5 minutes.
When I changed the name I also assumed I’d broken something. Having checked with the developer who built this integration it seems that would be unlikely. We’ve got a task now on our development planner so we’ll be giving this a full review shortly.
Just another thought while you’re looking at this. I don’t use Dropbox at all anywhere, I don’t need to as I have plenty of servers of my own replicated across various sites around the country so I only set up an account to stop Quickfile from filling my mail folder with backups (not so much size wise, more clutter and unnecessary noise).
It would appear that the backups are small enough that it would take quite some time to fill the 2GB free space I get, although I don’t know how big the backups are for other people. However, Dropbox doesn’t have any auto delete function, but I don’t really know whether this is something to worry about though.
Personally, I would be happier in general with the backups on one of my servers somewhere, so expanding the options on the backup screen to include FTP options or something would be useful. If this is unlikely then I may just set a filter on the mail server to auto archive all the Quickfile backups as I think the Dropbox integrations is probably more for people who actually use Dropbox anyway.
I have 1 years worth of backups for an XL sized QF account and it’s using 5.93 MB of space on Dropbox. If it became a problem I guess you could use some 3rd party auto-delete tool to purge all files older then n days. You could also in theory write a batch file or Powershell script to do this (some examples here).
I don’t think we’d go down the FTP route, there probably aren’t enough of our users who would be running their own FTP servers to make it worthwhile.
