Awesome

GdriveFS

GdriveFS is a project which brings a subset of dropbox-like sync functionality to users of Google Drive on *nix-based operating systems. Jim Sproch started this project and implemented the majority of the features, and I (Stephen) joined later and added much of the functionality for chunking of file reads and syncing writes.

Key userspace file system functionality is provided by Etienne Perot's excellent fuse-jna project.

A key difference between the way this software is implemented and something like e.g. Dropbox or Google's own Drive sync application for Windows/Mac is that files are not preemptively downloaded -- instead, file chunks are synced "on-demand" as the user reads them.

DISCLAIMER

We are not responsible for any lost data or other malady resulting from use of this software! (Though this is fairly unexpected esp. given ability to restore old versions of files from the Drive webapp.) This project is still in early stages of development and certainly has some issues (see known issues section).

Installing / Running

You can either run GdriveFS in development mode using the run script or you can build a .deb archive and install some scripts which allow you to mount your gdrive in much the same way you would mount any other file system.

Running

To compile classes into bin/ as well as build gdrivefs.jar, type:

make

From the project directory, you can now mount a gdrive by typing

./run <MOUNT_POINT>

Installing

To build a .deb archive, run:

make package

which can then be installed with

sudo dpkg -i gdrivefs-0.1.deb

To remove:

sudo dpkg --purge gdrivefs

Note that there is a dependency on Java 1.7 (or higher), but I left this out of the .deb control to allow users to the option of something other than open-jdk.

When you install with dpkg, this will place a jar-with-dependencies in /usr/lib, and a helper script in /usr/bin (called gdrivefs). After installation, you can mount a gdrive with the following command:

sudo mount -t gdrive <email_address> <mountdir>

And you can unmount using this command:

sudo umount <mountdir_from_earlier>

Known Issues

• The consistency model generally assumes very simple interaction between you and Google. Fancy things which change data on Google's end out from underneath GdriveFS are likely to break things.

• File chunks are cached in the $HOME/.googlefs directory. Garbage collection is not implemented, and this directory can end up turning into an enormous directory tree with a large number of files, which generally causes problems. If things are sluggish, when in doubt, blow away the $HOME/.googlefs directory with an rm -r.

• When I wrote the code which syncs writes to Google, Google's API had no way to patch portions of a file. This means that even very small writes must laboriously download the entire file, patch it locally, and then upload the entire thing to Google. Things may have changed since then, but for right now, it is not recommended to use this software for editing large files.

Contributing

Want to dive in and fix something or add some new functionality? Pull requests are always welcome.

Licensing

GdriveFS is licensed under the MIT license (MIT). JNA is licensed under the LGPL v2.1.