How to Sync Google Drive With Linux (Without Using google-docs-fs)

google-docs-fs is a very useful app that was created for Linux so as to mount Google Docs account as if it was a filesystem; It was also used to sync Google Drive accounts with Linux. Although, this app has become a bit old and its PPA doesn’t work anymore, the reason why I’m going to show you in this post another way to sync Google Drive with Linux (Ubuntu) using another app called Grive which is a CLI Google Drive client.

Installing Grive

To get Grive for Ubuntu, we’ll be using PPA Repositories; so, we need to run these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grive

Using Grive

First, you must create a folder in which Google Drive files are going to be stored. You can use this command to do that.

mkdir ~/GoogleDrive

Next, access that folder using:

cd ~/GoogleDrive

Since this is the first time you use Grive, you must add “-a” to configure it. So the command you need run is:

grive -a

This is going to give you a link that you should copy and past in you browser so as to allow Grive to access your Google Drive account, and get an authentication code that you need to past past in the Terminal

Now, every time you want your GoogleDrive folder to be synced, you must access it then run Grive, this time without “-a” argument because you’ve already configured Grive. OR you should simply download a .sh file that does the work for you.

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Don’t forger to allow execution of the .sh file; and Note that the it will sync ~/GoogleDrive folder, so if you choose another directory, you’ll have to edit the .sh.