How to sync your documents with Google Drive in Ubuntu

Grive is a Linux alternative to the official Google Drive client, which is not supported within the penguin's operating system. In case someone doesn't know, Google Drive is a service online  popular storage system that allows you to work collaboratively on document editing. However, the most common use of Google Drive is as a cloud storage repository, and in this tutorial we are going to teach you how to install Grive and configure it.

It is worth noting that Grive, although it shares many functions with the official client, is somewhat more limited than Windows and OS X versions. However, for some strange reason, the Big G guys have not yet thought of writing a version for Linux. In any case, we are going to get into the matter now and we are going to try to get you to get the most out of Grive.

Installing Grive on Ubuntu

Grive's client can be downloaded as a DEB package from your official website or install via PPA. The PPA that we are going to use in this guide has been created by the guys at WebUpd8, and in order to use it, open a terminal and run these commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grive

This will install the for mobile devices to report the in our operating system and we should be able to run it from terminal. If we write grive -help we should see a list of commands and modifiers that we can use.

Setting up Grive on Ubuntu

First navigate to the directory you want to use to sync with Google Drive. You may want to create a new one for that purpose. The next step is authenticate your Google account and allow the for mobile devices to report the interact with the service online. To do this, enter the following command in the terminal:

grive -a

This command will generate a single link in terminal that you can press and that will open in your default browser. A website with a 40-digit code which you will have to copy and paste into the terminal. After entering it, Grive will start uploading to the cloud the documents that are contained in the location to which you navigated before from the terminal. This will create the directories with the same structure that they have on your hard drive.

Running Grive

As soon as you have completed the previous step you will no longer have to re-authenticate to sync your files with Google Drive. The only thing you will have to do is navigate to the directory that contains the files that you want to synchronize with your Google Drive and type the following command:

grive sync

To avoid errors or long waiting periods while uploading more files than you expected, you can always check what Grive is going to sync using this command:

grive –dry-run

This command it will only show you what is going to be copied, without really syncing anything.

It is worth noting that Grive is still in its early stages of development, but nevertheless the synchronization works quite well. Users, of course, would appreciate more options, but considering that there is no official Google Drive client for Linux, this is our best asset.