gdrive-linux

Simple Google Drive client for Linux.

This script uses rclone and inotify to monitor a local directory for changes and automatically copy them to your Google Drive. Directory structure/hierarchy is preserved in the copy and dotfiles are ignored. The script monitors for creations, moves/renames, and modifications in the configured local directory and propagates them to your Google Drive. Deleting files locally will not delete them on your Google Drive.

Note about moving/renaming files:

Moving files/directories within the monitored local directory will upload a new file/directory in the new location to Google Drive. Likewise, renaming files/directories within the monitored local directory will upload a new file/directory with the new name to Google Drive. The old file/directory will still be in your Google Drive, and you'll have to explicitly delete it if you no longer want it. This script will not delete anything from your Google Drive as-is.

Prerequisites

• You'll need to have rclone installed, configured, and linked to your Google Drive.
• You'll also need inotify-wait for monitoring local file changes and notify-send for notifications (although both might be installed already depending on your distro).

Usage

1. Download gdrive.sh.
2. Open gdrive.sh in your favorite Text Editor.
3. Change RCLONE_REMOTE_NAME to whatever you named your Google Drive remote during rclone setup (if you forgot, you can run cat ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf, and it'll be in square brackets above the drive configuration).
4. Optionally change GDRIVE_DIR to point to the local directory where files will be monitored and copied from (defaults to ~/Drive and creates the directory if it doesn't already exist on script run). GDRIVE_DIR is meant to be equivalent to your remote Google Drive's root directory. So, if you create sample.txt in GDRIVE_DIR, then you should see sample.txt at the root of your Google Drive after upload. If you create BaseDir/NestedDir/sample.txt in GDRIVE_DIR, then you should see that same directory structure and file when you open up Google Drive.
5. Make script executable: chmod +x gdrive.sh.
6. Run script: ./gdrive.sh. You'll get a notification each time a file is uploaded to Google Drive.

(Optional) Copy some files/directories from Google Drive to your machine

If there's any files/directories in your Google Drive that you want copied to GDRIVE_DIR on your machine, you'll have to explicitly run an rclone copy, since this script only copies changes one way (from your machine to Google Drive).

https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/

(Optional) Run script on user login

I do this through a systemd user service.

1. mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
2. cd ~/.config/systemd/user
3. touch gdrive.service
4. Open gdrive.service in your favorite Text Editor.
5. Write the following (replacing the path to gdrive.sh)

[Unit]
Description=gdrive-linux systemd user service

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/bin/bash /path/to/gdrive.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

6. systemctl --user enable gdrive.service
7. reboot

Logs for the current boot can be viewed with journalctl -b --user -u gdrive.service.