Accessing Dropbox Datastore database - dropbox

I use an outdated iOS app called Loggr, and now would like to extract data stored in it. It syncs with Dropbox Datastore, which I can see on my Dropbox account:
But I cant find any files corresponding to among my Dropbox files. My question, how do I extract the information from the Datastore?

Dropbox Datastores are a structured data storage system, separate from files, so they won't appear as files in your account. They should be available under "Apps you use" here though:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps/datastores

Related

is it possible to read a Google Drive folder (all files) as BigQuery external data source?

I am using Google Drive as an external data source in BigQuery. I can able to access a single file, but unable to read a folder with multiple files.
Note:
I have picked up the shareable link from Google Drive for folder and used "bq mk.." command referencing the link ID. Although it creates the table but unable to pull data.
I've not tried it with drive so I have no sense of how performant it is, but when defining an external table (or load job), you can specify the source data as a list of URIs. My suspicion is that it's not particularly scalable and may run into limits in drive, as that's not a typical access pattern. Google Cloud Storage is a much more suitable datasource for this kind of thing.

Get "Folder Access Permission" in WinJS

I'm building an app that has projects. A project can have many files in it which are pointed to from a project file. Theses files are copied to the projects folder so I know where they will be but as far as I know in WinJS you can only get access to files the user directly give access to. The user will select the project file, I'll be able to read it but I'll have no way to access the projects files. I do know I can do something like package the project up as a single file and then extract the individual files in my apps local file system but doing so is sub-optimal to me and I'd prefer to do the folder based structure if I can.
I'm not entirely sure I get it, but I'll give it a shot. In a Windows Store app, you do have access to more than just what the user directly gives access to. If you want to pick a file from anywhere on the computer (our from other apps through the FilePicker contract) then, yes, the user has to pick them, but you app has full access to the isolated storage and if it declares access to the user's documents library and the user allows it, then you have access (to your declared file types) in there as well.
I think the choice of going to isolated storage versus the user's document library comes down to whether or not the user would expect to have the project files outside of your app. Might they email a project to a friend? Might they manipulate the project with another app? Might they want to back the project up? If so, then use their documents library. If not, then the data is more application data than user data and could be stored in the local app storage.
Hope that answers the question. If not, then please clarify.

Windows 8 Store Apps — which type of storage to use?

I'm a little bit confused over the various types of storage that is available to Windows Store Apps.
Let's say I had a notepad app, where users can view, create, and edit notes. What storage type would I use for storing the notes? Local storage? Write the notes out to files in the user's Documents folder? Also, what if I wanted to sync a user's notes via the cloud? I understand that Roaming Data has a rather low size limit.
Almost all the options you mention are possible for a notepad application. Except the roaming data option, that only allows you to store 100KB of data.
I will try to sum up the options that you have and add a few more:
Localstorage
You can easily add these files to localstorage, you can store it in file format or serialize your object and store that one. Very easy to implement. Con is that only your app can access these files.
Documents folder
Also an option. Made easy by use of different filepickers. For example the FileOpenPicker or the FileSavePicker. Files can be stored in the format you like and can be accessed by other apps or through the file explorer.
Roaming data
No option for files due too the limited space
Skydrive API
If you want to store files in the Cloud and access them anywhere you could consider the skydrive api. Also note that if you use the filepickers you also have the option to save/load these files to skydrive. (Although in that case the user chooses where to store the file.)
Windows Azure Mobile Services
Another option if you want to store data in the cloud. Gives you the ability to store your data in a table/tables. Very easy to implement. More info about mobile services can be found here
SQL Lite
If you need a local database to store your data than SQLLite can be an option. Tim Heuer has wrote a nice blogpost about how to use SQLLite in your windows 8 app. You can find it here
Hopefully this clears up things a bit and gives you some ideas about what to choose for your app?
In an app like this (a notepad style app), the logical place to store you files in in the user's documents folder. That way they are accessible to the user from other apps as well as the current one. There is, of course, the option to roll your own methods to upload the data to SkyDrive as well, but you really shouldn't rely on this as being your only data source - what if the user is offline?

Backup Isolated Storage as whole and recover

I am developing a Windows Phone 7.1 application. The app serializes objects to JSON and saves them to the IsolatedStorageSettings file.
The objects also have images that the user may capture with a camera. These images are saved to Isolated Storage as a jpeg file with the "Extensions.SaveJpeg" method. Images are referenced by a unique ID from the object JSON so they can be loaded from the storage with the object itself or loaded only when needed.
Now that I have this up and running, I would like to create a backup to SkyDrive functionality with recovery.
What I want to ask is how can I simply backup the Isolated Storage as whole, and recover as whole?
I've been thinking if there is a way to (1) generate a zip file containing the whole Isolated Storage, (2) upload that to SkyDrive, (3) downloading from SkyDrive and (4) unzipping it replacing any existing files in the storage.
The steps (2) and (3) I know how to do (instructions found easily by google). I can also do step (1) but with many lines of code. I am seeking for a simple solution to zip the whole storage and recover from it.
I recommend you to use Perst as the local database solution for your windows phone application.It can be imported or exported as xml which you can upload/download to/from SkyDrive or other cloud system.
Home page of Perst:http://www.mcobject.com/perst/

File permissions on a web server?

I'm new at writing code for websites. The website allows users to upload files, such as profile pictures or other pictures. The files are saved in the unix file system and the URLs to find those images are stored in a MySQL database.
It seems like the only way I can let the user upload files is to give write access to anybody using chmod. Otherwise it complains that it doesn't have write permissions. But they shouldn't be able to write whatever they want or overwrite other users stuff. Similarly, to allow users to see images that they have rightful access to, they need read permissions on the file system. But now that means that anybody with the url to that picture can see the image too, correct? That's not what I want.
Is there a solution to this contradiction? Or am I thinking about the problem incorrectly? Thanks for any help.
You need to manage the permissions in your application and not expose arbitrary parts of your local filesystem directly to the clients. Your application should decide what files someone can see or where to write data. You should not trust data (filenames, etc) from your clients...ideally, store files on disk using systematically generated names and store human-readable names in the database.
SunStar9,
Since you are already using a MySQL database to store the URL of the image on the file system, why not just store the image itself as a BLOB (binary large object)?
This is generally a well-accepted design practice for allowing users to upload binary data to a website.
Are you using PHP, Java, Ruby/Rails, or something other to develop your website? Depending on what you are using, there could be file upload/management plugins or modules that will help you develop what you are trying to do if you are certain you want to use the files ystem for storing the image data.