Effective August 1, 2024, Solid Backups is removing support for Google Drive backup destinations. This means that as of that date, no new backups will be added to Google Drive remote destinations. Existing files already stored in Google Drive are unaffected, but the ability to transfer files between Google’s servers and your WordPress website is impacted and will cease to function.
Background
When Solid Backups, then known as BackupBuddy, was originally released in 2010, the website backups it produced were stored on the hosting server’s file system along with the WordPress site. While these backups could be downloaded for safekeeping, the more optimal solution for many users was to send backups “off site” to remote destinations. To that end, Solid Backups added support for Amazon S3 buckets, FTP servers, Dropbox, Stash (our own remote storage system), and, in 2014: Google Drive destinations.
Why the Change?
In the 10 years since we began supporting Google Drive, the landscape of cloud computing and storage has changed dramatically. Hardware costs associated with storage have fallen, and at the same time, security has become an increasing concern as malicious actors have become much more motivated and sophisticated in targeting websites and cloud vendors for attacks.
To help secure their users’ data, Google has implemented more and more restrictive policies around access to the Google Drive API. At SolidWP, we have great appreciation for these policies and the lengths to which Google has gone to secure Google Drive.
At the same time, however, Solid Backups has an aging code base. To continue to update the existing Solid Backups code in order to meet the constantly shifting requirements instituted by Google requires substantial development resources.
Re-imagining Solid Backups
Over time, our own development practices have become more sophisticated, and we have engaged in lengthy evaluations of the Solid Backups code and determined that the time has come to re-imagine a WordPress backups solution from the ground up.
We believe that our resources are better spent building a “cloud first” Backups solution for the modern era — one that offloads the processing and storage requirements from your servers to ours.
We look forward to making more details available about this exciting new evolution of Solid Backups in the near future.
Alternatives to Google Drive Cloud Storage
Although support for Google Drive is being deprecated, a number of remote backups destinations options still exist within Solid Backups, including:
- Solid Backups Stash
- Amazon S3
- Dropbox
- OneDrive
- sFTP
Special Offer on Solid Backups Stash
We recognize that for some users cost is a key consideration and is one reason users have chosen to store backups in Google Drive. We have a plan for you! That’s why we’re delighted to announce that we are making even more Solid Backups Stash storage available to Solid Backups users at no additional charge. If you’re a Google Drive user who is affected by this change, reach out to our Account Services team today to take advantage of this limited-time offer (choose the “I have a question about my account” option when submitting the form).