Google Drive & Dropbox backups

What it does

Connect your agency’s own Google Drive or Dropbox as an offsite destination, and each site sends its backups straight there — the archives go from the client’s server to Google or Dropbox directly, never through WPClientHub. It works like an S3 bucket or an SFTP server, without keys to create: you sign in with Google or Dropbox once and approve one narrow permission.

Google Drive and Dropbox destinations are part of Studio, Agency and Scale (the 14-day Agency trial includes them). S3-compatible storage and SFTP stay available on every plan, Free included. Each site needs the WPClientHub One plugin 0.12.0 or newer to upload to them.

How to connect

1. Open Backups and scroll to Offsite storage. Press Connect Google Drive or Connect Dropbox (owners and admins).
2. Sign in with the account you want the backups in, and approve the one permission it asks for (see What the consent screen asks for).
3. You come straight back to Backups. The new destination shows the account’s email and how full it is, and Checking… while one of your sites writes a small test file to it, reads it back and deletes it. When that works it says Writable.
4. On a site’s Backups tab, under Schedule & offsite copy, choose the destination and save. From the next backup on, that site sends a copy there.

What the consent screen asks for

• Google asks to let WPClientHub “see, edit, create and delete only the specific Google Drive files you use with this app”. That is the drive.file permission, and it is the only one requested — not your email, contacts or the rest of your Drive. If Google shows it as a tick box, leave it ticked; without it nothing can be uploaded and the connection is refused.
• Dropbox asks to give the WPClientHub app its own folder — Apps/<app name> in your Dropbox — with permission to read and write files there, list them, and read your name, email and storage use. Nothing outside that folder is reachable.

Both ask for offline access, which is what lets backups run at 3 a.m. without you signed in.

What WPClientHub can — and can’t — see

• Google Drive: only the files and folders WPClientHub itself created. It creates one folder, My Drive › WPClientHub, and everything goes inside it. Your other files are invisible to it — and so is anything you copy into the WPClientHub folder yourself, because WPClientHub didn’t create it.
• Dropbox: only the app’s own folder, Apps/<app name>. Backups go in a WPClientHub folder inside it.
• The hub never sees what is in your backups. Sites upload and download the archives themselves. The hub itself only reads the account’s email and storage use, creates the WPClientHub folder, and lists and deletes backup folders to keep the number you asked for — it never opens an archive.

Where the files go

Every backup is one folder: WPClientHub/<site>/<year-month>/<backup id>/, holding database.sql, files-001.zip (and more parts for big sites), the standalone wpch-restore.php and manifest.json, which is uploaded last. <site> is the site’s address, for example brightleaf.co. So a backup can always be found — and restored with the standalone restore script — straight from Google Drive or Dropbox, even without WPClientHub.

How the connection is kept safe

• The long-lived grant Google or Dropbox gives WPClientHub (the refresh token) is stored encrypted in WPClientHub’s database and never leaves it — no site, no screen, no export ever sees it.
• For each backup or restore, WPClientHub issues the site a short-lived access token inside the signed backup instruction. Google’s last an hour; Dropbox’s last four hours, but the site is told to use one for an hour at most. A long upload gets a fresh one from WPClientHub as it goes, and the site forgets the token the moment the job ends.
• Disconnect revokes the grant at Google or Dropbox and deletes it from WPClientHub. The backups already there stay in your account.

Uploads that survive slow hosts

Archives go up in 8 MB chunks through Google Drive’s resumable uploads and Dropbox’s upload sessions. Progress is saved after every chunk, so a host that stops the request, a time-out, or Google or Dropbox asking us to slow down (HTTP 429) never means starting again: the upload carries on later from the last chunk the service confirmed. After the upload, every file is checked against the service’s own record — the exact size plus Google’s MD5 or Dropbox’s content hash, recomputed on the site — and only then is the restore point marked site + Google Drive (or Dropbox) on the Backups page.

Keeping it from filling up

Google Drive and Dropbox have no lifecycle rules, so WPClientHub keeps the newest 30 backups per site there and deletes older backup folders (a whole month folder at once when everything in it goes). Change the number with Edit on the destination — anything from 1 to 365. It runs after every backup that lands there and once a day, never deletes a backup a restore is reading, and never touches anything outside the WPClientHub folder. Backups kept on the sites themselves follow each site’s own schedule.

Restoring from Google Drive or Dropbox

Pick the restore point on the site’s Backups tab as usual. If the site still has it, nothing is downloaded. If it doesn’t (the server was rebuilt, or the site keeps fewer copies than the destination), the site downloads the backup back from Google Drive or Dropbox in 8 MB pieces — resuming if interrupted — checks every file against the manifest, and only then runs the normal restore. See Restoring a site.

When something needs you

• Needs reconnecting. If the access is revoked (in your Google account’s security settings or Dropbox’s connected apps), the account’s password changes, or the grant expires, the destination is marked Needs reconnecting, the Backups page says so at the top, and one alert goes to everyone who gets backups failing alerts — including your Slack, webhook and email notification routes. Until then, new backups stay on the sites; nothing already uploaded is touched. Press Reconnect and sign in with the same account (a different account is refused, because its Drive doesn’t hold these backups).
• Almost full. The account’s storage is checked every day. Over 90%, the destination’s bar turns red and the Backups page warns, before backups start failing to fit.

Plans and downgrades

If your organization moves below Studio, nothing is deleted and nothing is held back: Google Drive and Dropbox destinations stop receiving new backups (each site keeps backing up to itself, and to S3 or SFTP if its schedule uses one), the backups already there stay, the clean-up pauses, and restoring from them keeps working — you can even reconnect a broken connection to get at them. Upgrade again and new backups go there from the next run.

Limits & defaults

Troubleshooting