overGrive!

In my earlier post about Google Drive for Linux I enumerated several options available for getting Google Drive to work under Linux.

The first option I tried was actually not on the original list. After I installed a Windows 10 Home virtual machine on my Ubuntu 15.10 Desktop, I downloaded and installed the Google Drive client for Windows. I set up a Shared Folder between my Ubuntu host OS and the Windows 10 guest OS so that Google Drive would actually sync everything to my /home/<user>/Google Drive directory under Ubuntu. I thought this was going to be an easy solution to the problem of not having an official Google Drive client for Linux.

Turns out I was wrong. The Google Drive Windows client completed the initial sync process which was good, but then it would immediately bomb out and quit with an error which was bad. Not much of a point having the Google Drive client on Windows if it's not going to stay opened and monitor the Google Drive shared folder. Therefore I uninstalled the Google Drive Windows client from my VM and went with my second option.

So I decided to give overGrive a try. Sure I had to pay $4.99 for a license to run it but I thought that was a reasonable price for a dedicated Google Drive for Linux client. Purchasing the license with PayPal was simple and downloading the latest DEB package for Ubuntu was trivial.

I started going through the installation instructions for Ubuntu and was doing fine until I hit the section about pressing the "Connect account..." button and linking overGrive with my Google Drive account. For whatever reason, Chrome kept opening up a new window with no tabs instead of bringing me to the Account Management screen in Google.

After contacting overGrive support, I did some searching and came across this thread Ubuntu 15.10 Chrome: external links are opened as blank tabs in new browser window. I just had to edit ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop and add the %U parameter to the end of the Exec= line. Now external links like the one from "Connect account..." work properly and I was able to link up overGrive with my Google Drive account.

Currently overGrive is still doing its initial sync with Google Drive. It has taken quite a bit more time for overGrive to complete this task on Ubuntu than for the Google Drive Windows client. It seems the difference between the two is that the Google Drive Windows client appears to be multi-threaded and asks to sync several files at once while overGrive appears to be single-threaded and asks to sync one file at a time.

Google Drive for Linux

I am an admitted Google fanboy, especially of their Google Drive product. Unfortunately, after nearly four years since Google announced a Linux client was coming it is still MIA. Going to the Google Drive download page gives you this message:

A bit ironic that the page says, "Get Drive Everywhere", and then in the fine print states, "Running Linux? Stay tuned - Drive for Linux isn't ready just yet." At this rate who knows if Google will ever release a Linux client for Google Drive.

Since Google doesn't support Linux with their Google Drive app, what options are available?

• drive: This little command-line utility was originally developed by Burcu Dogan while she was on the Google Drive team. It has since been taken over by Emmanuel Odeke and appears to be well-maintained.
• google-drive-ocamlfuse: This is an interesting project in that it allows a user to mount Google Drive on Linux as just another filesystem. The author Alessandro Strada maintains a PPA so that it can be installed and maintained with Apt.
• GoSync: This is an open source Google Drive client for Linux written in Python. It looks like from the v0.4 release that a lot of improvements were made including:
• Ability to select folders to sync
• File rename, move, and deletion now supported
• rclone: Rclone is the Swiss Army knife of cloud storage command-line utilities. It can sync files and directories to and from a number of cloud storage services including:
• Google Drive
• Amazon S3
• Rackspace cloud files
• Dropbox
• Google Cloud Storage
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• Microsoft OneDrive
• The local filesystem
• etc...
• insync: Touted to be "The most powerful Google Drive client ever built", insync integrates Google Drive with Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has an impressive list of features on its website. Yes, it is closed-source and requires you to purchase a license in order to use it. An entry-level consumer license for one Google account runs $25.
• overGrive: A GUI-based tool that supports a wide array of Linux distributions and desktops including Ubuntu Unity. Like insync, it too is closed-source and requires purchasing a license for $4.99 which is a latte at Starbucks. It does have some minor limitations (no symlink support) but appears to do most everything else you would need. Comes with detailed instructions on how to install on Ubuntu.

There are quite a few intriguing options for getting Google Drive to work on Ubuntu. What are your thoughts on which of these solutions should be the one to go with?