Is it possible to backup the Group Speed Dial settings automatically?

[bruce2704]

The Backup/Export feature in Group Speed Dial is very useful. It would be even more helpful if a backup could be run automatically on a schedule, or if I could use a batch file command to run the backup. Is this possible?

Thank you!

[Juraj-Masiar]

The best way is to create the cloud account (it's the main reason I've build it).
The second best way is automated backup in the Options page:

The backup screen may look different depending on the browser you use, for example Firefox can create backups only the Downloads (sub)folder.

[bruce2704]

Thank you for your prompt reply, Juraj. On my version (using Brave), I have a button for "Select folder for backups". But when I click that, nothing happens.

[Juraj-Masiar]

Thanks for reporting this.
It looks like Brave disabled filesystem API:
brave/brave-browser#11407

So yeah, this won't work on Brave.
What I can do, is implement the fallback method I'm using for Firefox - it's the one where the backups are created in a folder inside the default Downloads folder.
I'll make sure to implement this in the upcoming release 28.4, which should be released pretty soon.

[bruce2704]

Thanks for this insight and clear plan for the future, Juraj.

[Juraj-Masiar]

New version 28.4 has been approved and released.
I've just tested it in Brave and it works, but there is another bug that I missed somehow when developing this...
The backup file has wrong extension - it ends with ".json" instead of ".group_speed_dial", so to import it, you would have to rename it first.
I'll try to fix this and I'll report it to W3C as a browser API inconsistency.

[gerinho64]

Same to me, Brave is not "a good friend" of Group Speed Dial... even when you try to do a full manual backup (Export all), it creates a file with random (or maybe not random) characters in name. Firefox, Vivaldi are working fine.
Regards

[Juraj-Masiar]

Thanks for testing it!
I was testing it Windows, and now I've tried it in Ubuntu but it seems to work fine there too.
Also, by default Brave even asks where to store the backup and the file name is already there:

But it works also when that option is disabled.

So this may be a Mac specific issue.
I'll try to fire up my old Mac at work to see if I can reproduce it there and if yes, I'll report it to Brave.

[gerinho64]

Yea, I can confirm, Linux Mint (ubuntu based version) is working fine; it must be a MacOS issue , for sure... as far I can remember, the Export All option never created a correct filename in Brave in MacOS.
Regards

[Juraj-Masiar]

So, I've just fired up my Mac Mini running Sequoia 15, but sadly, I can't reproduce it.
Are you running latest Brave? (based on Chromium 138)
Also, could you try to switch the option that will make it ask you where you want to store the backup?

[gerinho64]

Yea, latest version of Brave.
As @bruce2704 wrote before, the option to choose where the backup will be stored is unavailable... it works in Firefox and Vivaldi.
Thank you

[bruce2704]

Just for reference, I am working on Windows 11: the automatic backup option is not working there.