Automated Backups - SharePoint

Emskie321

Hello team,

I have scheduled weekly backup in Smartsheet and I was wondering if it is possible to have the backup file automatically moved to a SharePoint folder.

At the moment I need to download the file every week and and upload it to SharePoint.

I am hopping that there is a way to automate this process.

Thank You.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Emskie321

I hope you're well and safe!

It's probably possible, but you need a solution that collects the download link from the email, downloads it, and then uploads it to Sharepoint.

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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marc4

We use Zapier for this. Have a rule that forwards the emails from Smartsheet to Zapier. Zapier can extract the url from the message, retrieve the file and save it. We save it to Google Drive, but you could save it anywhere.

You could also do this with PowerAutomate.

We used Zapier because it was free and fast to implement.

/marc

Lee Joramo

Several suggestions:

1. Zapier and similar third-party services are the easiest way for the non-programmer/non-system admin
2. If you have a Smartsheet Team or Enterprise account, I would look into using Smartsheet's backup tool. This will allow you more flexibility to schedule what, when, and where to save the backup files. https://github.com/smartsheet-platform/backup-java
3. In the 1990's -- before web API's became common -- email was often the primary way to exchanged data between computer systems. It is easy to write a python, perl, or your language of choice to grab emails and their attachments and do what ever you want. To this day I maintain several operations that make use of this. While this does need a computer you control to run the code, you are not dependent on a third-party service.

As an example of option 3, I asked ChatGPT: "Using python, login to a POP mail box and down load all *.ZIP file attachments sent from "test@example.com" and save the files to the directory /myComputer/myfiles/". Here is the code it generated.

import os
import poplib
from email import parser
from email.policy import default

# POP3 server details
pop_server = 'your_pop_server'
pop_port = 995  # Change this if your POP3 server uses a different port
pop_user = 'your_email@example.com'
pop_password = 'your_password'

# Sender and directory details
sender_email = 'test@example.com'
download_directory = '/myComputer/myfiles/'

def download_attachments(msg):
    for part in msg.iter_attachments():
        if part.get_content_type() == 'application/zip':
            filename = part.get_filename()
            file_path = os.path.join(download_directory, filename)

            with open(file_path, 'wb') as file:
                file.write(part.get_payload(decode=True))
            print(f"Downloaded: {filename}")

def main():
    # Connect to POP3 server
    pop_conn = poplib.POP3_SSL(pop_server, pop_port)
    pop_conn.user(pop_user)
    pop_conn.pass_(pop_password)

    # Get the total number of messages in the mailbox
    num_messages = len(pop_conn.list()[1])

    # Retrieve and process each message
    for i in range(num_messages):
        # Retrieve the email message
        _, msg_data, _ = pop_conn.retr(i + 1)
        msg_text = b'\r\n'.join(msg_data).decode('utf-8')

        # Parse the email message
        msg = parser.BytesParser(policy=default).parsebytes(msg_text)

        # Check if the sender matches the specified email
        if sender_email in msg.get_all('from', []):
            download_attachments(msg)

    # Close the connection
    pop_conn.quit()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

I have not run this code... you would want to closely review and test the above code.

... the above looks about like what I have written many times over the years. My code is typically far more complex to deal with copying data into a database, or other actions. But the basics of fetching email attachments and saving them is pretty simple.