Mounting Google Drive and Dropbox

BLUF

Use the rclone command to mount Google Drive and Dropbox folders under linux. BLUF: this is the script ... how to get there follows ...

#!/bin/zsh -f

# mount remote drives using rclone (https://rclone.org)
#   also see https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-mount-google-drive-locally-as-virtual-file-system-in-linux/
#
# - all remote drives must be created using 'rclone config' before they can be used here
# - note the '&' at the end -- the rclone process creates the mount and stays in the foreground
# - unmounting the drives is as simple as killing the appropriate rclone process

# mount personal google drive first
nohup rclone mount mygoogledrive: /home/ewilliam/gdrive &

# mount family picture google drive
#nohup rclone mount familygoogledrive: /home/ewilliam/familydrive &

# mount dropbox
nohup rclone mount dropbox: /home/ewilliam/dropbox &

Implementation

(this article is heavily excerpted from https://www.ostechnix.com/how-to-mount-google-drive-locally-as-virtual-file-system-in-linux/)

Rclone is a tool to sync files and directories to and from local and remote cloud storage providers. It can also serve local or remote files over HTTP/WebDav/FTP/SFTP/dlna. Rclone is a free and open source application written using GO programming language.

On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Deb-based systems:

$ sudo apt install rclone

On Fedora:

$ sudo dnf install rclone

Once installed, run the following command to give permission to Rclone to access your Google drive:

$ rclone config

The configuration is mostly self-explanatory, but reference the above mentioned web page if there are any questions.

The configuration is stored in this directory (for future reference):

~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf