Learn how to map Google Drive as a fast network drive on macOS, Windows or Linux. Access your entire Google Google Workspace account on-demand without having to suck up disk space by pre-syncing all of your data.
Version 7.7.6 for Mac, Windows and Linux
February 19th, 2021
Google Drive is an excellent service suitable for both personal and professional use. It allows uploading, sharing, and syncing files across devices. Because of its immense popularity, Google officially offers desktop clients for Windows and macOS. There are some ways to enjoy Google Drive on Linux, especially on Ubuntu. In this article, how to install Google Drive on Ubuntu 20.04 is explained. Create a directory and tell google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount your Google Drive there. Mkdir / GoogleDrive. Google-drive-ocamlfuse / GoogleDrive. In order to verify the mounting is successful, run the following command. You can access it directly using the file explorer.
Also, even the Google Drive sync app for personal account has the feature, so users can sync only the data they need on their PCs, and put everything else on the cloud only. In addition, especially, the Drive File Stream app, which is available for Gsuite accounts, is basically a stream specification that does not save data to a local drive. Jun 14, 2019 This tool supports popular cloud storage services like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. It even also supports Amazon S3 and Wasabi. You can use CloudMounter to mount multiple cloud drive accounts of the same storage service. For instance, you can mount two or three Dropbox accounts. CloudMounter itself is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Getting started with Google
Google Drive is Google's file storage and sharing product for GSuite. For personal accounts it comes with 15GB of free online storage. Business, enterprise and academic GSuite plans have unlimited storage.
Most people use Drive via their browser directly at https://drive.google.com. Serious users need a full native integration on their desktop that lets them access files in the cloud from within any application.
Google provides native integration options such their iOS/Android App and their backup and sync client, available for regular GSuite accounts. If you're looking to get full native access to Google Drive in Finder or Explorer a shared network drive is a great option.
Mounting Google Drive
ExpanDrive is a powerful Google Drive client that connects to Google's API transforming Drive into a fast network drive. It makes your entire accounts available from any app on your desktop. Chrome version 45 release date.
Version 7.7.6 for Mac, Windows and Linux
February 19th, 2021
Sync clients generally require you pre-download and keep a copy of all the files you're interested in on your machine. This takes up valuable harddrive space, time and bandwidth. Often for files you don't need. With a shared drive you can access everything on-demand. If your company has many TB of data stored in the cloud and you travel with a small laptop, a mapping a network drive to Google lets you have the best of both worlds.
Connect to multiple accounts
Another nice thing about connecting to Google Drive as a network drive is that you can connect to multiple Google Drive accounts at the same time. You can map the root of your Google Drive or an individual Team Drive as a drive letter. You can even configure ExpanDrive to mount individual folders within your personal drive or within a Team Drive. If you're working on a project confined to one tree of folders, this can be really convenient.
Powerful Server Edition
Head over to our ExpanDrive Server Edition page for instructions and packages for Windows and Linux servers. ExpanDrive Server edition is designed to run unattended, at boot [versus login], and provides drives that can even be re-shared on the network.
Requirements
ExpanDrive supports macOS 10.10 or newer and a wide variety of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Centos, Fedora, Redhat, and more. Learn more about how to install ExpanDrive for Linux here.
ExpanDrive runs on Microsoft Windows 7 through Windows 10. Windows Server is also supported as well as RDP/Terminal services environments. ExpanDrive can isolate multiple users logged into the same machine so they each have their own view of cloud storage.
Map specific Team Drive
Let's say you're working on a team of people that is all using the same Team Drive. You can map that team drive to its own drive letter by configuring the remote path inside ExpanDrive. All of the team drives are organized in the 'Team Drives' folder. If you had a Team Drive named 'work' you could mount just that by setting the remote path to '/Team Drives/work' inside ExpanDrive.
Files on demand
Saving disk space or accessing huge shared Google Drive accounts is another great thing about ExpanDrive and Google Drive. Everything is accessed on demand without preemptively syncing data back and forth. So if you were working on a huge Team Drive like in the previous example you could mount that entire space without needing to first sync it to your computer. You can also easily mark files to be available as offline so you can get work done even without an internet connection.
Access Google Drive as a shared drive
ExpanDrive lets you actually mount your Google Drive account as a virtual drive, just like a USB Drive, on Mac or Windows. It adds Google Drive to Finder so you can browse and access your Drive account without needing to first sync your files, which takes up time and space on your laptop. Just access what you need, when you need it, from within any app like Finder, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, Photoshop, or whatever you use. Everything is safely in the cloud but not taking up space on your computer. Isn't that the point of cloud storage anyways?
Free up hard drive space
What good is a 10TB account if your only supported mechanism move data is via sync. Jason Snell recently wrote a piece at Six Colors called the Dropbox Terabyte Conundrum about this same problem with Dropbox's new 1TB plan. Using Sync to move your data means you need to pick a folder that mirrors your Drive account and then keep a copy of all that data on your machine. So unless your laptop have a 10TB Drobo or Synology NAS attached to it, then you can't really DO much with a 10TB Google Drive account. Unless you have ExpanDrive.
We've written before how easy it is to access Google Drive on Ubuntu (or any GNOME-toting Linux) thanks to GNOME Online Accounts and Nautilus.
But power users of Google's cloud storage service say they're less than impressed with the performance of that go-to gvfs (Gnome Virtual File System) approach.
So here's an alternative way to use Google Drive on Linux using google-drive-ocamlfuse.
This method has all the same benefits of the GOA approach, but is (in my testing, at least) more performant meaning the reward more than outweighs the initial outlay of effort.
Google Drive Ocamlfuse
Google-drive-ocamlfus is a FUSE-based file system powered by Google Drive. It lets you mount your Google Drive on Linux so that you can access your files and folders, either via the command line or through a traditional GUI file manager, like Nautilus, Nemo or Caja.
You can interact with these files directly. Open them. Edit them. Delete them.
Double-clicking on, for example, an image will open it in the default image viewer:
Video files can be streamed directly from Google Drive (you don't need to download them first); and most other files will open in their logical apps.
Features include:
- Full read/write access to ordinary files and folders
- Read-only access to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
- Multiple account support
- Duplicate file handling
- Access to trash (.Trash directory)
- Unix permissions and ownership
- Symbolic links
- Read-ahead buffers when streaming
A Note on What This Isn't
This method is not an alternative to a native Google Drive sync client like InSync or OverGrive, which creates and local copies of your files for offline access. Chrome latest stable version.
With thus FUSE method all your Google Drive files remain remote. If your internet connection dips out, so does access to files you haven't made local copies of.
But what it does allow you to open most files in local apps and write changes to the file direct to Google Drive. Think of it this as a remote USB thumb drive: you can copy, edit, write and open files while it's attached.
Mount Google Drive Without Sync Download
Install Google Drive Ocamlfuse
Google Drive Ocamlfuse is available to install on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and up by using the following dedicated PPA:
Arch Linux users can install google-drive-ocamlfuse from AUR.
How to use Google Drive Ocamlfuse
With the install complete you can go ahead and set up the app to work with your Google Drive account. While there isn't a fancy-pants GUI front-end for setting things up don't feel put. GDO is super simple to use via the CLI.
To get started run the app from the command line using this command:
The first time you do this the utility will create all the relevant config files and folders it needs to mount your Google Drive account. It will also launch your default web browser so that you sign in and authorize access to your Google Drive files.
Sign in with your Google username and password and, when the screen above appears, grant the utility permission to access your files and folders.
That's it; you're pretty much good to go!
All that's left is to create an empty folder in which to mount Google Drive on your system.
Google Drive Sync Windows
Once created go ahead and mount it there by running this command:
Pop open Nautilus (or whichever modern file manager you use) and you will see your Google Drive mount listed in the sidebar as a device.
When you're finished editing, adding or copying files you can unmount the fuse filesystem with this command:
You can try to unmount it using the eject button you'll see in Nautilus, Nemo, etc but this won't work; you'll get a permissions error.
Google Drive Sync Android
More Options & Configuration
See the official wiki for more details on installation, authorisation, and advanced usage. You can also run google-drive-ocamlfuse --help from the command line to see the various arguments and flags you can use.
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