We’re presently well advanced with work on a new Google Drive back-end for UpdraftPlus (both free and premium).
Why is this needed? Firstly, our old one uses an API which Google are planning to deprecate in just over 12 months time. So, it needs doing before then.
Secondly, the Google Drive backend has fallen behind our others, both in terms of code quality and capability. Google Drive is the only remote storage option in the current release of UpdraftPlus which cannot re-scan remote storage to discover pre-existing remote backups (e.g. ones created by another site which you’re trying to clone).
Our new backend is now mostly complete, and just needs a lot of testing. It will add the following features:
- Use of Google’s current Drive API, for compatibility beyond 20th April 2015
- Ability to re-scan remote storage
- Chunked downloading of large backups (so you can download infinitely large backups and resume where you left off if progress is interrupted)
- Ability to choose, by name, any folder in your Google Drive for backup (Premium – new installs of the free version will back up to a fixed folder called “UpdraftPlus”; existing installs of the free version which have a raw numeric ID typed in will continue to work).
- Requires a shorter list of permissions
- UpdraftPlus settings page will show the name of the owner of the Google Drive account you are connected to (when managing many sites, it’s easy to forget!)
It should be fully compatible with the existing backend – i.e. nobody will need to update or change their settings. All this is achieved with 20% less code than our existing Google Drive backend.
Possibly it will also be compatible with web-servers with the PHP Curl module (which is much less than 1%, but every little counts). We’ve not determined this yet.
David Anderson (lead developer, founder, UpdraftPlus)
