Google drive linux clients

How to Use Google Drive in Linux

Last updated September 13, 2021 By Munif Tanjim 57 Comments

Brief: While Google Drive is not officially available for Linux, here are tools to help you use Google Drive in Linux .

Google Drive is an integral part of the Google ecosystem. It offers 15 GB of free storage which is shared across your Gmail account, Google Photos, various Google and Android services.

Since its debut in 2012, we’ve seen official Google Drive clients for Windows, OS X, Android, iOS. But, unfortunately, an official Linux client is yet to see the light of the day, if ever. This deliberate and continual ignore by Google has prompted Linux users to question if Google hates desktop Linux?

However, in the world of Linux, there’s always an alternative or workaround. Here we’re going to see such alternatives ways you can use Google Drive in Linux .

Some applications mentioned here are not open source. They are listed here because they are available on Linux and the article’s focus is on Linux.

Best tools to use Google Drive in Linux

The list here is no particular order. I have just listed a few Google Drive desktop clients for Linux along with some other hacks.

1. Insync

Insync is the most feature-rich Google Drive desktop client available out there. You’ll find almost everything you want from a Google Drive client in it, including multiple account support, desktop notification, symlink support etc.

It’s available for all major Linux distros and the installation process straightforward. It offers a beautiful GUI as well as the command-line interface.

The only downside is that Insync is neither free nor open source. Insync provides a 15-day free trial period. After that, it’ll cost you about $29 one-time payment for a single account and for multiple accounts, Insync has per-year pricing plans. If you have no problem with that, we can safely say that Insync is the Google Drive desktop client you’re looking for.

3. Rclone

Rclone is actually more than just a Google Drive client. It is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from various cloud storage services, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, OneDrive etc. The installation and usage documentation can be found on their official website. For configuring Google Drive with Rclone, read this.

It’s completely free and open source. You can find the source code in the GitHub repository of Rclone. If you are comfortable working with the command-line interface, you can pick this one.

There are some GUI implementations of this tool like Rclone Browser that let you use Rclone in a slightly easier manner.

3. overGrive

overGrive is yet another feature-rich Google Drive desktop client. It includes almost all the features from Insync with some exceptions, such as no symlink support. It provides a nice GUI and an interactive setup process. overGrive supports all major Linux distros and desktop environments. It’s also available in multiple languages.

Though overGrive is not free, its price is far less than that of Insync. The license fee for overGrive is only $4.99. It can be a good choice for Google Drive desktop client.

4. Drive

This one’s a little bit interesting. Drive was originally developed by Burcu Dogan, while working on Google Drive platform’s team. So, this is the closest thing we have to an official client.

It’s a command-line tool written with GO programming language. It doesn’t have background sync feature. It’s designed to upload/download files in a push/pull style. Frankly, it’s a little difficult to use it for everyday purposes. You’ll find a complete guide for Drive on its GitHub project.

Platform specific installation methods can be found here.

5. GNOME

If you use GNOME as your desktop environment, you’re in luck. Starting from version 3.18, GNOME has baked in a Google Drive feature in their file manager Nautilus.

If you add your Google Account in GNOME Online Accounts, Nautilus will automatically have Google Drive added to its sidebar as a remote filesystem. It’s not actually a desktop client. But you can do some cool things like drag&drop file uploading, opening Google Drive files directly from Nautilus, copying files from Google Drive to your local filesystem etc.

Your pick?

It’s totally disappointing that Google hasn’t yet come forward with an official Google Drive client for Linux despite the growing popularity of Linux. Until it does, these alternatives are all we have.

Speaking of alternatives, there are many other free cloud storage services and some of them even provide native Linux clients. I use pCloud and MEGA for my personal photo backup.

Which one of these is your favorite? Do you have any other suggestions to use Google Drive in Ubuntu or any other Linux? Are you facing trouble using any of these methods? Whatever the reason is, you’re always welcomed to use our comment section.

Like what you read? Please share it with others.

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How to Use Google Drive on Ubuntu Linux

Its now 2020 and we are still waiting for official google drive client from google, but we have few clients that work flawlessly.

In this tutorial, we’ll focus on how to use Google Drive on Ubuntu 18.04. Ready? Let’s dive in and see how this can be seamlessly achieved.

1) Ubuntu GNOME built-in Method

Step 1. Installing GNOME Online Accounts feature

To start off, log in to your system as the root user or as a regular user with root privileges. Next, run the command below to install the Google Online Accounts feature.

Step 2. Launching GNOME Online Accounts Feature

Once successfully installed, start GNOME Online Accounts by running

This will launch the Online Accounts Window as shown. Thereafter, click on ‘Google‘

This will prompt you for your email address. Type it in and hit Enter.

Next, provide your Account’s password as shown and click on ‘Next‘ or hit Enter.

The next Window, will display the all the features from your Account that GNOME wants to access.

Scroll to the bottom and Click on ‘Allow’

By default, all the features as shown below will be synched. You can choose either to turn the Sync functionality OFF or ON. For best practice, leave the default settings as they are.

Great! We are all set! You can access your Google Drive folder using Nautilus File Manager commonly known as Files.

The drive folder can also be accessed by double-clicking on the mounted partition located on your GNOME’s desktop as shown below.

It is important to note that when using the GNOME Online Accounts feature, Drives files will not be stored locally.

2) Using google drive ocamlfuse

Ocamlfuse is a FUSE-based file system backed by Google Drive. It is written in OCaml and lets you mount your Drive folder on your Linux System and gives you access to your files and folders, either via command line or GUI file manager.

Features

Below is a summary of some of the ocamlfuse features

• Provides support for multiple accounts
• Provides support for Symbolic links
• Can handle duplicate files
• Grants access to the trash directory
• Maintains UNIX permissions and ownership
• Handles read-only access to Google Docs — Sheets, Slides
• Provides full read/write access to ordinary files and folders

Installing Google Drive Ocamlfuse on Ubuntu 18.04

To install the Ocamlfuse run the following commands in that order

Once successfully installed, authorize google-drive-ocamlfuse client with your desired Google account using the following command.

This is going to pop open a page on your browser where will request you to choose a Gmail account to continue with the setup

Next, Gdfuse will request access to your account.

Click on the ‘Allow’ button to allow google-drive-ocamlfuse to access your Drive.

You’ll then be prompted for your password

You will then be asked to choose the account to use

Finally, create a mount point in your home directory and mount the directory

To verify the creation and mounting of the directory, run

using Nautilus, you can click on File on the Menu and be sure to find a Google drive option at the bottom. Click on it and wait for a few seconds for file synchronization to begin. After a short while, you’ll have access to all your files.

3) Insync

Insynch is a paid, powerful cross-platform GUI client tool that adds drive functionality to your Linux desktop. Some of the features include:

• Handling of multiple accounts
• Gmail support
• G-Suite support
• Sync on Demand
• On-demand synching of shared files
• Desktop Notifications
• Provides a common-line for Linux
• Support for Raspberry Pi
• Merging folders
• Support for symlinks

To install Insync head out to Isync’s Official download page and select your System’s distribution. For this case, we will download the Debian package for Ubuntu 18.04. as shown

Select accordingly your Operating System, version and architecture and click on ‘Download’. This will download the Debian package for Ubuntu 18.04 version

Once the Debian package, install Insync by opening the terminal, navigating to the folder containing the Debian package and run

Upon successful installation, Launch the Search Menu, search for the application and launch it.

This will pop open the Insync Window below. Click on ‘Add a Google Account’

This will open a browser page where will ask for your email-id. Provide your email and click ‘Next’.

Next, you will be prompted for your password. Once you’ve keyed in your password hit on ‘Next’

Here, you will be required to Allow Insync to makes changes to your Drive account

Scroll down and hit ‘Allow’

Nautilus integration with Google Drive will thereafter commence.

Click on ‘Yes’ to integrate Insync with Nautilus

Select your preferred pricing

Synching of files will begin

4) Rclone

Rclone is a command line tool used for synchronizing files and directories from a myriad of cloud service. These include DropBox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, OneDrive Nextcloud and many more.

Now, let’s see how we can install Rclone.

Installation

We’ll install Rclone from a precompiled binary. To do this, open a terminal window and issue the following commands:

First, download the rclone zip file using the curl command

Next, unzip the rclone zipped file

Navigate into the file

Now, copy the binary file and give it the proper permissions with the following commands:

Finally, install the manpage with the commands:

Configuring Rclone

Next, we will set up Rclone to sync to Google Drive.

To configure rclone, issue the command:

You will be required to select the type of storage you’d want to configure. Select the appropriate number corresponding

You will be asked a number of questions, most of which are self-explanatory.

The only questions that might give you a headache are

To all of the above, just hit Enter.

For the Value «scope» = you can provide whatever name you want. By default, it will be drive. You can leave that or type something more meaningful.

Eventually, your default browser will pop open, prompting you to select which Google account you’d like to use. If at this point you’ve not already signed into your account, you’ll be required to do so at this point. Once that completes, answer a few more simple questions and then quit the configuration script. Your connection is now set up.

Allow rclone to access your account by clicking on the «Allow» button

You’ll get the following confirmation that it has been successful.

To copy a file to Google-drive using rclone command type

Drive-CLI is another command line utility tool for drive to access, sync, download, upload directly to your drive. We hope that this tutorial has been helpful. Go ahead and try out some tools and let us know what your experience was! Your contribution will be appreciated.

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