Amazon Cloud Drive

Zhup     Jun 3 1:23PM 2017 GUI

Hello,

Are you going to implement the Amazon Cloud Drive?


gchen    Jun 3 3:47PM 2017

We don't officially support Amazon Cloud Drive, but we do have a storage backend that works with Amazon Drive.

If you want to give it a try, you'll need the CLI version to initialize the storage. First, go to https://duplicacy.com/acd_start to download a token file, and then run the CLI version with the init command to initialize the storage. The storage url should be like acd://path/to/storage. Also, remember to encrypt the storage by providing the -e option to the init command, otherwise Duplicacy will not be able to connect to that storage when you run backup or any other commands.

After you initialize the storage with the CLI version, you can switch to the GUI version and select the repository. The storage url will be automatically loaded.


gchen    Jun 3 10:04PM 2017

Here is what happened with the Amazon Cloud Drive storage backend:

We started the development at a time when Amazon Cloud Drive was open to third-party developers. We created a a new API key (or security profile in their terminology) and whitelisted the security profile so that it can be used by Amazon Cloud Driver users after authorization. However, we made a mistake when whitelisting the security profile -- the permissions weren't enough to read all files. We should have requested for clouddrive:read_all but we got `'clouddrive:read_other' instead, which means that plain text files are not accessible by Duplicacy. Most files stored to the storage by Duplicacy are binary files, except for the 'config' file when the storage is not encrypted. Therefore, our security profile works only if the encryption is enabled.

After we realized the mistake, we created a new security profile but found out that there wan't any option to whitelist the security profile. We contacted the Amazon Cloud Drive team who told us that there was no way to modify the permissions of a security profile after it has been whitelisted, and Amazon Cloud Drive had just become invitation-only so we had to request for an invitation only. After answering several questions they turned down our request. This was a surprise at first but it was understandable -- Amazon Cloud Drive is targeted at personal users and Duplicacy has no way to prevent business users from using it. However, this leaves us in a strange position -- on one hand we have a working security profile (if the storage is encrypted), and on the other hand they can block our security profile any time, especially considering the fact that it was acquired before their approval was needed. Therefore, we decided to not officially support Amazon Cloud Drive, but you can use it at your own risk.


Granite    Aug 26 12:31PM 2017

Hopefully you can chip away at this.... $60 cdn unlimited is a real steal. Unclear if there's a glass ceiling on this.