Remote Backup – Box.com?

[Danielle OlsonParticipant]

Hello

Would you consider creating an add-on to support remote storage to box.com?

Thanks!

[udadminKeymaster]

Hi Ahmed,

My understanding is that box.com has a WebDAV and an FTP interface – if you Google, it brings up documentation on these – so, it should already be possible to use one of those UpdraftPlus Premium to backup to box.com.

David

[Danielle OlsonParticipant]

Excellent. Thanks! I got it working. Shall I be worried about my Box password being in UpdraftPlus plugin. Do you guys encrypt this information in my WordPress site database?

[udadminKeymaster]

Hi Ahmed,

Encryption can’t do that sort of thing. To be able to encrypt and decrypt, you need to have an encryption key ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_%28cryptography%29 ). But to be able to access box.com when you’re not present, that means the encryption key has to be stored and usable for decryption. In WordPress, the only place to store things is ultimately some location in the database. But, an encryption key in the database protecting something else also in the database is ultimately doing nothing.

The best thing you can do is activate the option to encrypt your database, using the option in the UpdraftPlus settings (and remember your encryption key, of course), so that backups of it are useless to anyone without the key.

Other setups, instead of using passwords, use one-time tokens – e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive; or in the case of Amazon S3, you can set up credentials that are only usable on one bucket. Does box.com not allow you to set up credentials that can only be used to reach a limited part of your account, and forces you to use the master account password instead? I’m not that familiar with box.com.

David

[Danielle OlsonParticipant]

Thanks David. I thought you might be encrypting the WebDav info somewhere in the code before it is stored into the database.

Anyhow, I looked into Box and it seems that they have an API that I can use. I’m curious though where to add the information. For example, with Amazon S3 there is an option in UpdraftPlus to choose and then add the keys.

[udadminKeymaster]

Hi Ahmed,

An API is a thing that programmers consult in order to write specific code. So, using Box’s API means that we’d have to write specific code in order to do that. Since Box has support for WebDAV and FTP already, and so does UpdraftPlus, it’s seemed redundant for us to invest time in coding specifically for their API, as it’d only achieve something – being able to backup to Box – that is already achievable. So, we’ve not looked much into it yet, as there are other storage providers we currently have no support at all for that we’re eager to add.

David

[Danielle OlsonParticipant]

I got that. Thanks. I was just concerned about putting my Box password right there in UpdraftPluss setting without it being encrypted. I’ll look into the other solutions.

[Author]

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