Joomla automated backup to Cloud service

Well.. what's the use of the backup if you can't have it when you need it the most. I learned it the hard way. I had joomla website which is backup using Akeeba. Being on the free version, had to settle for cron job that triggers the backup. 

Following is the php snippet that trigger Akeeba backup profile.

$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,
SITEURL.'/index.php?option=com_akeeba&view=backup&key='.
SECRETKEY.'&profile='.PROFILE);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION,TRUE);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS,10000); 
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

So far good. But to be real useful your backup needs to somewhere else. And what better than free cloud service like Dropbox or Google drive. Akeeba professional has out the box integration with Dropbox. For google Drive, you can get it done by following below steps

1. Firs you Need to create a Google Drive service account. Here is nice post that has detailed steps about it 
2. Get the latest google drive client API.
3. Use cp2goole that has helper methods to connect to Google drive
4. As I was on PHP 5.2 has to hack two things

•   to get around finfo to get MIME type, use the system command//$fi = new finfo( FILEINFO_MIME ); //$mimeType = explode( ';', $fi->buffer(file_get_contents($path)));
  $mime = exec('file -b --mime-type ' . $path);
  
•  Google_P12Signer.php , use the hack  
• 5. then write script that is specific to your needs
  

  $dir = "backupsDir";
  $dh  = opendir($dir);
  $strToSreach = "NameOfThebackpFile".date("Ymd");
  printf($strToSreach);
  $nameOfFile = "";
  
  //Search the file
  while (false !== ($filename = readdir($dh))) {
     
    if( substr($filename,-4) == ".sql" && substr($filename,0,15) == $strToSreach ) {
          printf("Found the file: ".$filename);
          $nameOfFile = $filename;
      }
  }
  
  $path  = $dir."/".$nameOfFile;
  
  printf("zipping the file: ".$nameOfFile ."
  ");
  
  exec('gzip  ' . $path);
  
  $path  = $dir."/".$nameOfFile.".gz";
  
  
  printf( "Uploading %s to Google Drive\n", $path ."
  ");
  
  $service = new DriveServiceHelper( CLIENT_ID, SERVICE_ACCOUNT_NAME, KEY_PATH );

  And with this, if you run this script, your backup should get triggered, it should create a joomla backup with SQL file, it should get zipped and sent to your google drive and your should get an email that says Backup has been shared with your email account !