Mounting Google Drive in a Droplet

Hey @samhobbs,

The Droplets DigitalOcean provide are completly under your control. This would suggest that there is a way to mount a Google Drive under a Linux distribution it’s doable on the Droplet.

As for articles, yes I couldn’t find one either however following the general way to mount the Drive under a Linux distro should suffice. Doing a quick search provided me with some steps - Please note, I’ve not tested them :

Using Rclone:

Rclone is a command-line tool used for managing various cloud storage services, including Google Drive. It can be used to mount Google Drive as a local disk.

First, install Rclone:

sudo apt install rclone

Then, configure Rclone with Google Drive:

rclone config

Follow the prompts to add a new remote connection, name it (e.g., “gdrive”), select Google Drive as the storage type, and authenticate with your Google Drive account.

Once it’s configured, you can mount your Google Drive

mkdir ~/gdrive
rclone mount gdrive: ~/gdrive &

Using google-drive-ocamlfuse:

google-drive-ocamlfuse is a FUSE-based file system backed by Google Drive.

First, add the necessary PPA and install the software:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

Authenticate google-drive-ocamlfuse with your Google Drive account:

google-drive-ocamlfuse

This will open a new tab in your web browser asking for permissions. Once you allow the permissions, you can close the tab and return to the terminal.

Now, you can create a directory and mount your Google Drive:

mkdir ~/gdrive
google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/gdrive

Each approach has its pros and cons. Rclone is highly flexible and powerful, but it requires comfort with the command line. google-drive-ocamlfuse is a bit simpler, but it’s not as feature-rich as Rclone.

Let me know if that helps!