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backups

phadley
phadley
Community Member
in 1Password 4 for Windows

I have read there's no support for Google Drive synchs, but it is true I can use Google Drive for backups by setting my password data location to a folder inside my Google Drive folder location. That way, Google Drive sync will back it up for me..? Is that true, or am I missing something?

Comments

  • DBrown
    DBrown
    1Password Alumni

    1Password includes a built-in backup system, and you can certainly redirect that to any local drive on your computer. We recommend you do not use Dropbox for that, because (a) the automatic backups are big and would use up your Dropbox allocation, and (b) having your 1Password data on Dropbox inherently gives you an off-site copy of your 1Password data. I assume both of those reasons would apply to Google Drive, as well, though it should be said that I don't use Google Drive for backups, myself. (I have a disk image duplicator running nightly, and incremental changes recorded hourly, both going to separate local external hard drives.)

    I also know that you can store your 1Password data on any local drive on your computer (specifically, not to a network share drive, though), and I assume that could include a drive that's connected in a Dropbox-like manner to some service like Google Drive. Again, I'm not familiar with the details of Google Drive sync'ing; I use it only for storing the occasional Google Docs file that I create in Google Apps.

    It's important to note that we officially test and support only Dropbox as the sync mechanism for 1Password for Windows.

  • phadley
    phadley
    Community Member

    You missed the boat entirely. I'm only using my Google Drive for my password data for the purpose of backups (not syncing). I am gathering, however, that you don't touch Google Drive with a ten foot pole, so you can't tell me how it might be used with your product.

    If this forum were easier to use, I'd post a screenshot of what I'm doing. But, alas, it requires a web URL! Your site appears to be HTML5, so here's a link for your developers to chew on: HTML5 Demo Drag and drop, automatic upload

  • DBrown
    DBrown
    1Password Alumni
    edited November 2013

    The expression about not touching something with a ten-foot pole entails an aspect of dislike that I neither expressed nor intended, @phadley. You mentioned synchronization in the very first line of the thread, and I merely wanted to let readers know about a number of things related (albeit tangentially, in some cases) to everything you brought up:

    • The built-in backup feature in 1Password, because not everyone reads the user's guide from virtual cover to virtual cover, and it's a great feature to know about, especially in a pinch.

    • The reason, in case they did use Dropbox, why they might not want to store their backups there. (I assume the same warning would apply to any service in which one has a limited amount of on-line storage space, even if that space is free.)

    • The fact that, because we need to sync among Macs, PCs, and iOS and Android devices, we long ago chose Dropbox for its excellent support for those platforms, among other reasons. I don't test other cloud storage services because I have a limited amount of time to spend on any given aspect of 1Password, and it makes the most sense to spend that time testing the services we do support.

    What some readers might not understand is that they would not achieve sync'ing by storing their 1Password backup files on a shared drive, because they'd have to do a manual "restore from backup" operation on every machine sharing that Google Drive in order to get changes made in 1Password on one machine into 1Password running on another machine.

    Synchronization in 1Password, on the other hand, is automatic. It's also absolutely unrelated to the built-in backup mechanism. An important point I chose not to mention in my earlier reply is that 1Password uses a different backup format on each operating system for which we provide the software, so synchronizing across platforms simply by storing backup files on a shared drive would be impossible.

    I'm truly sorry my reply upset you, @phadley—that certainly wasn't my intent. I don't think I missed the boat, though. I just needed to make a few things clear, because this is a public forum where many people look for information that seems related to some problem they're trying to solve, and I clearly should've done a better job of explaining the issues I was trying to clarify.

    Thanks for asking the question, and thanks again for using 1Password!

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