Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors’ web storage interfaces. Over 70 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, as well as standard transfer protocols.
It has the following common functions:
- Synchronize, copy, or move files between different cloud storage services or local folders
- Migrate files between cloud storage services
- Serve files from cloud storage services via HTTP, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, or DLNA
- Encrypt or decrypt files on cloud storage services
- Serve an experimental web-based GUI
- Mount one or more cloud storage services together in a local directory
We’ll only discuss the last case, configuring a single Google Drive account.
Let’s start by installing rclone using the official script:
$ sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash
[...]
rclone v1.65.1 has successfully installed.
Now run "rclone config" for setup. Check https://rclone.org/docs/ for more details.We prepared a reference guide to rclone config, as its output is too verbose:
- Select n for a new remote, which is a named remote storage system
- Enter a name for our remote, like gdrive
- Enter the number for Google Drive, which is 18 in rclone 1.62.2
- Leave client_id and client_secret empty unless we have our own Google API credentials
- Choose 1 for full access
- Leave the service_account_file empty
- Avoid advanced configuration with n
- Choose y to authenticate rclone with a browser
- Avoid configuring a shared drive with n
- Select y to confirm the configuration
- Choose q to finish the configuration
If everything is correct, we can list the files and directories in our Google Drive account:
$ rclone ls gdrive:
text.txtFinally, we can mount Google Drive to a local folder. In the following commands, we need to replace gdrive with the name of our remote, if different:
$ mkdir ~/GoogleDive
$ rclone mount --daemon --vfs-cache-mode full --write-back-cache --vfs-write-back 10s --vfs-cache-max-age 300s --vfs-cache-max-size 5000M --vfs-cache-poll-interval 60s --cache-dir /tmp gdrive:/ ~/GoogleDrive/In this way, the integration of Google Drive into the local file system is seamless both with the file manager – Nemo, in our case – and with any other application, such as LibreOffice. This is mainly due to the –vfs-cache-mode full option.
If you don’t use the google drive anymore, you can unmout it by following command:
fusermount -u ~/GoogleDrive