In the past when I clicked the Download button on the backups screen, the browser downloaded the file. Now the tooltip reads “Send email with download link” and it emails me with a link to download it. Is that new behavior that I just missed or is there an issue with my install?

There’s no way to disable this feature, and because we want to be very secure by default I can’t see us allowing a user to do that any time soon. You could build a plugin that allows you to access the backups directly. The encryption key is not a bad idea as a separate feature, but it wouldn’t mean we’d pull back this feature.

Sorry for the late reply. Oh yeah, allowing a user to disable the feature kind of makes the feature meaningless I suppose, hadn’t thought of it that way. Then I’ll consider making a plugin .Thanks for the quick response and suggestion!

We had an issue here because it made it much harder to download a backup from a (third party) provider where we don’t have shell access, and upload it to one of our own servers. Especially when handling a large backup and both servers are in the USA (we’re in Europe) this process was costing us hours instead of minutes. Somehow the backup link does not work with an api_key so a simple wget will not work :frowning: We made a small script that can be called from the command line. It needs three parameters: username password download link from the email, including the token So something like ./download.sh myuser mypass https://forum.mysite.com/admin/backups/mysite-2017-05-31-113000-v20170526125321.tar.gz?token=d31de61bc07f7bc9060717bc57828584 Here is the script: #!/bin/bash USERNAME=$1 PASSWORD=$2 URL=$3 HOSTNAME=$(echo $URL | awk -F/ '{print $3}') TOKEN=$( curl \ --header "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" \ -A "MSIE" \ -b cookies.txt \ -c cookies.txt \ -v\ https://$HOSTNAME/session/csrf|awk -F: '{print $2}'|cut -c2-89 ) echo "Using Token $TOKEN Username $USERNAME Password $PASSWORd" curl \ --header "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" \ --header "X-CSRF-Token: $TOKEN" \ --header "Origin: https://$HOSTNAME" \ -A "MSIE" \ -b cookies.txt \ -c cookies.txt \ -v\ --data "login=$USERNAME&password=$PASSWORD" \ https://$HOSTNAME/session curl \ -A "MSIE" \ -b cookies.txt \ -c cookies.txt \ -O \ $URL One more suggestion: would it be an idea to exclude the email with the link from being affected by the disable_email setting?

I think it a quite bad idea. Because the browser downloader usually stops at some time. The backup package is quite big usually, but if we only have one chance to download and then the link will pastdue, usually it will download half and stoped there. Can you support breakpoint resume download? If not, you’d better think of a better way to help people successfully download the whole package with the browser.

I understand that you want to be very secure by default. But can we have non-default options? Or can we have an option to send the link to a new target email address? I strongly agree to set it to enable as a default option.

There are many features that can be set as disable or not default. Maybe they are not supposed to be meaningless.

Email link or not isn’t the main issue here. Now we must remember that downloading backup was a solution for real issue and that was, and is, too rarely done backups. I take backup of database of my webstore every 5 minutes. My CMS takes backup every hour. With Discourse the freshest fish I get is once a day natively. That means because I’m lost with docker and anything else another than MySQL/MariaDB I’m taking everyday a risk to loose some content if something goes bad in this window of 24 hours. That has happend to me once, actually.

With the current email link method, when I was downloading backups in a region with a restricted network, I always got stuck at 30%, even if I used VPN for some time.

I will have a similar issue in the future if it is still email-link-only at that time.

Download backup - email link only

Product Support

C_T (C T) August 24, 2022, 2:28am 14

I have the same issue. I have to disable this feature for personal reasons.

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Download backup - email link only

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