Do you know that there is no official Google Drive client for Linux? And, that you have to rely on third-party tools and SaaS serivces to backup/transfer your Google drive data?
Recently, I’ve been involved in one such migration exercise, where we have to resort to using a number of third-party and open source tools to backup/transfer.
Here is the list of tools we evaluted:
Gdrive. The most popular and verstaile CLI client for Google Drive. A tutorial here, video here. OpenSource.
Overgrive. A good desktop client solution for Linux. Supports a lot of distributions and desktop. Paid.
Skicka. Skicka is swedish for “to send” which vaguely alludes to what the tool does. An unofficial google product with ‘alpha’ quality, as termed by its developers. Promising. Supports encryption.
Drive. Originally developed by a Googler, this project is very active again. Supports all popular Linux distributions. Opensource.
rclone. The swiss army knife program to sync files and directories to and from Google Drive, S3, Dropbox, OneDrive or local file systems. Has a ton of features. Opensource.
Grive2. It is the fork of abandoned Grive with added support for new Drive REST API and some new features. Can do two-side synchronization. There are few limitations like not supporting downloading of Google documents, undefined behavior with multiple folders/files with same name or with multiple parents. Opensource.
CloudBerry Backup. From the popular CloudBerry Lab folks. Has clients for all major platforms. Supports Amazon S3, Azure, GCP etc. Freeware version available. Not opensource.
I’m tuned towards [1] and [5] for now having used them with some reasonable success in the past.
What is your recommendation?