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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#42820 Backups not uploading to Google

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla!’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
5.4.3
PHP version
8.3
Akeeba Backup version
10.3.2

Latest post by rocher on Sunday, 22 March 2026 17:29 CDT

rocher

Hi Nicholas,

The size of my Akeeba backups and the time to finish the backup process was growing, so I did some website admin, cleaning up files on my main website, tallandtrue.com.au

My largest folder was /administrator/components/com_akeebabackup/backup, but that's because I take regular backups and hadn't managed my backups, deleting duplicate-days and well out-of-date files for a long time.

After doing this, I opened my Google Drive to delete the associated backups in the website folder. However, I discovered the last backup file in the folder was from mid-February.

I checked my other Joomla and WordPress backup folders (I use Akeeba for both) and found the same result. There were no recent backups. 

I've not had any error messages during the Akeeba backup process on and, although the backups for tallandtrue.com.au and the WordPress website are large files (370 Mb and 382 Mb respectively), the backup my latest Joomla site is only 66 Mb. 

As Akeeba is not displaying error messages, I suspect the problem lies with either my websites host (VentraIP) or Google. I've attached the latest log file from a tallandtrue.com.au backup to Google (again, no error messages and the file was not in the Google Drive folder), hoping this might help point in the right direction.

Regards, 

Robert Fairhead

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

I do not see any problems in your log file. You have configured Google Drive correctly, it connects correctly, and it appears to be uploading the files just fine. In fact, I see that each 10 MiB chunk takes about 2 seconds to upload which is a reasonable amount of time; I would be worried if I saw it taking under a second as it's physically impossible – and I literally mean "faster than speed of light" kind of impossible.

Please check your Google Drive trash folder. If you deleted a folder that has the same name as the folder you are uploading the backup archives into (or at least the same name as one of its parent directories) you might end up uploading directly to trash. Yes, I know, it is insane. I am doing exactly what the Google Drive API documentation says to avoid it but for some (not all!!!) Google Drive accounts it seems to have no effect. I have seen other people reporting the exact same thing for years, and nobody at Google seems to care – quite unsurprisingly, I might add. The workaround I've found is moving the files to the correct folder by hand, then removing the problematic folder from Google Drive's trash completely. Once it's fully deleted, the Google Drive API no longer resolves the upload path to the trashed directory.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

rocher

Thanks, Nicholas, you pointed me in the right direction to resolve my problem.

My backup Websites folder was not in the Google Drive trash folder, but browsing my Google Drive, I found I had TWO Websites folders!

The first folder, dated 9 Mar 2018, which I searched yesterday, has the Akeeba backups for all my Joomla and WordPress websites dating back to my first backup. But the most recent backup is 13 Feb.

The second one, dated 16 Feb, only has recent backups (since 16 Feb) for three of my websites. And this would be right because I've only backed up these websites recently.

Obviously, Akeeba is targeting the second Websites folder. I've renamed the first folder (WebsitesX) and I plan to copy the Akeeba backups from it to the second folder. 

PS. I have no idea how I ended up with two Websites folders. But I'm grateful for your help in resolving this problem.

Regards, 

Robert Fairhead

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager

Yeah, this is a symptom of the same issue with Google Drive.

Google Drive was originally meant to be just storage for Google Docs and Google Sheets. It wasn't designed as a regular filesystem. It does not actually have a directory structure based on directory and file names like a regular filesystem does. It has object IDs, with each object also having a user-facing name.

When you tell Akeeba Backup to use, let's say, the path Foo/Bar it means nothing to Google Drive. It can only upload data to an object inside a folder object fed to it by ID. What we have to do is get the ID of the drive root. Then we ask Google Drive to list the entries in that folder ID matching the drive root's ID which have the exact name "Foo". If one does not exist we create it and use its ID. Repeat that for "Bar" with the ID of the "Foo" directory. And so on and so forth.

Sometimes, Google Drive will either return the ID of a folder object that's in the trash (even though we explicitly tell it not to returned trashed items), or fails to find the folder object even though it exists. Since the user-facing name is just a non-unique label, you may end up with two same-named folder objects in the latter case. Which one will be returned first from that point onwards is anyone's guess.

If that sounds stupid, yeah, it is. It is one of the MANY reasons I am telling people NOT to use Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox for storing backups. These services are not made with data resilience or performance in mind. They are cheap for many reasons, none of which gels well with the need for reliable, fast, and durable storage for backup archives. But they are cheap, they are usually part of a bundle deal, people ask for them, and I provide an integration despite my better judgement. And that's how I end up replying to 100 times more tickets about Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox than for all other storage providers combined.

I strongly recommend spending the price of a pizza per month to get much better storage from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Wasabi, etc. I would assume there might be a number of S3-compatible providers in Australia; unfortunately, I am only familiar with the European and USA-based ones due to these being the prevalent demographics of this software.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

rocher

Thanks, Nicholas. And thank you for supporting Google Drive despite all its failings. Yes, it is cheap, but it's also less admin for me because it's tied to my Google Workspace bundle.

I'll pay more regular attention to my Akeeba Backup folders in future in case Google Drive fails to find the folder object again.

Regards,

Robert Fairhead

 

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