Google drive is a free cloud storage provided by Google where you can store files accessible from any where in the world as long as you have an internet connection.

Google also provides Google Drive syncing tool that can be used to sync the contents of Google Drive with a local folder residing in your local computer. Though this tool is offocially available for Windows PC, none is available for Linux hosts.

As a work around there are few third part tools available that does the job.

GRIVE is such a tool that can be installed on various Linux Operating Systems.

In this post we will see how we can install grive tool in an Ubuntu 14.04 desktop host.

• Open a terminal window and login as root
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thefanclub/grive-tools
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install grive-tools

If you get dependency errors please solve it. If you get an error “grive-tools : Depends: grive (>= 0.3) but 0.2.0-1.1 is to be installed”, you may have to uninstall the existing version of Grive package, and install a Grive package >=0.3

Grive package can be found in:  http://www.ubuntuupdates.org/package/webupd8/trusty/main/base/grive

• mkdir /home/Grive
• cd /home/Grive/
• grive -a
• You will get a URL now.
• Post the URL in a browser where you have kept the desired google drive opened.
• You may be propmpted to answer some questions
• At the end of the process you will get a string of characters you will have to copy, and paste it in the terminal window

You may see some output such as :

• Reading local directories
  Synchronizing folders
  Reading remote server file list
  Synchronizing files
  sync “./temmpp” created in remote. creating local
  sync “./How to get started with Drive” created in remote. creating local
  Finished!

If you do not get any error, then you should be fine

Verify if you can see the files in the folder by running the following command:

• ls -ltrA