Duplicity and Dropbox short-lived token expires

Question

Since Dropbox switched from long-lived to short-lived access tokens duplicity isn't working properly anymore as the token expires. Is it possible Is there a fix/workaround to this?

Answer 1

The Duplicity Dropbox backend still doesn't seem to support short-lived tokens, but you could use the Duplicity rclone backend instead, which is part of the Duplicity codebase since version 0.8.09. It allows Duplicity to back up to any target that is supported by rclone – and rclone supports Dropbox short-lived tokens out of the box since version 1.54. Here's how to set this up:

1. Set up the rclone dropbox remote using rclone --config. The default choices worked for me. See the rclone dropbox documentation for more details.
2. Test that the remote works, for example by listing the remote files using rclone ls [your-remote-name]:
3. Run duplicity with a target in the form rclone://[your-remote-name]:

Answer 2

Dropbox is in the process of switching to only issuing short-lived access tokens (and optional refresh tokens) instead of long-lived access tokens. You can find more information on this migration here.

Apps can still get long-term access by requesting "offline" access though, in which case the app receives a "refresh token" that can be used to retrieve new short-lived access tokens as needed, without further manual user intervention. You can find more information in the OAuth Guide and authorization documentation.

Note that this is something that would need to be implemented by the programmer of the app though, so if you are not the programmer responsible for this integration, you may need to get an update from them to support this.

Answer 3

Please report this to duplicity issues.