Skip to main content

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Learning Resources
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell Zapier's products AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Share your knowledge
Give back to the Community by sharing your automation wins and helping to answer questions.

Share your success See unanswered questions User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

Hi

I’d have thought that this would be a straightforward thing to do but I’m struggling...

I’d like to copy a backup file from a specific location on my hard drive to Dropbox, on a daily basis.

Many thanks

 

P.S. I can’t put it onto one of the limited folders that Dropbox can do backups of at the moment so Zapier would be ideal.

Hey @primrosehill!

While using Zapier to upload a file to Dropbox is straightforward, as is scheduling, the tricky piece here is that Zapier won’t have access to your personal computer while running the automation. This means you’ll have to have some intermediate, cloud-based step where the data can be stored. Then Zapier will be able to access the data from that location. Could you save the file to your Google Drive, One Drive, or in Airtable? 

Thanks for your reply. The backup file is created automtically every day (it’s a POS system called Lightspeed) and will only save in a specific location on my Mac, rather than to a remote location. Of course, if I could get it to save to a folder within Dropbox that would solve the issue. 

I don’t know how to get the backup file to a safe location in case anything ever happend to the server essentially backing up to itself.

@primrosehill In that case you may want to consider looking into a script or app for mac that you can schedule to copy the file into the Dropbox folder for you. 

That sounds great in principle. For a novice, any idea how I might do that?

Hey @primrosehill, hope you’re well, I just wanted to check in here!

Zapier will only be able to work with apps and devices that have an API that can send or receive data. Since the POS is backing up the data to a local machine, you would need to set up something like your own local API server that would serve up the file to DropBoxes API.

I did some Googling and I found a GitHub repo for a simple python script for uploading a file to Dropbox: https://gist.github.com/Keshava11/d14db1e22765e8de2670b8976f3c7efb

I have not reviewed the code in the above repo and do not endorse it’s developer, but it can serve as an example for you to get started with a local script for uploading files to Dropbox. 

I don’t recommend setting up custom scripts unless this is something you’re familiar with and can review the source code personally for any potential issues regarding security or privacy.

I’m also going to move this over to our Webhooks and Code section in case anyone else may have some solid insight into this workflow for you. :)

Terms & Conditions