gdrive-stash

Quickly and easily upload local files and directories to your Google Drive from the command line.

About

gdrive-stash is a simple script intended as an addon for glotlabs's gdrive. Older, deprecated versions of gdrive offered the ability to upload the contents of entire local folders to Drive, but it is no longer possible to do so with gdrive's currently maintained API.

This script restores this functionality: any files added or modified in the local directory are updated in Drive; files deleted locally are NOT deleted in Drive, though that functionality could be added fairly easily if there is interest.

This program could likely be much more efficient, but I wrote it for personal use and I'm satisfied with it. Feel free to optimize it if you're feeling motivated.

The .py version of this script works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS, and is much faster because it uploads files in parallel. The .ps1 script has only been tested on Windows and may not be compatible with other platforms.

Usage

gdrive-stash takes two required parameters, srcDir and destDir:

• srcDir: The path to the folder to back up

• destDir: The path to the folder where you will save the backed-up files (they are copied directly into srcDir; a subfolder called scrDir is NOT created)

For destDir, "\" (or "/" on *NIX OSs) is treated as Google Drive's root directory (the folder called "My Drive" in Google Drive).

By default, gdrive-stash only copies files from the top level of srcDir. To copy all subdirectories and their contents, pass the flag -r (short for -recursive).

Additionally, by default gdrive-stash will exit if you pass a nonexistant path as your destDir value. To force gdrive-stash to create the destDir path if it doesn't exist, pass the flag -p (short for -makeParents).

Finally, to speed up runtime, you can optionally pass a Google Drive ID instead of a path into destDir. If you do this, make sure to pass the flag -i too (short for destDirIsId).

NOTE (Powershell script only)

Any optional flags must be passed after srcDir and destDir, not before, unless you specify the required parameters explicity by preceding them with -srcDir and -destDir.

• Wrong: .\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\path\to\my\stuff" -r "\"

• Ok: .\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\path\to\my\stuff" "\" -r

• Also ok: .\gdrive-stash.ps1 -srcDir "C:\path\to\my\stuff" -r -destDir "\"

Examples

NOTE: These examples use the Powershell script and Windows-style paths, but they apply equally when using the Python script and *NIX-style paths.

.\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\foo\bar\mystuff" "\"

Result: All files in mystuff are copied into Google Drive's root directory, excluding subdirectories.

.\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\foo\bar\mystuff" "\mybackups"

Result: All files in mystuff, excluding subdirectories, are copied into mybackups, which resides in Google Drive's root directory. If mybackups doesn't exist, the script will exit.

.\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\foo\bar\mystuff" "\mybackups\todays-date" -p

Result: All files in mystuff, excluding subdirectories, are copied into mybackups\todays-date, which resides in Google Drive's root directory. If either of those directories doesn't exist, they will be created.

.\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\foo\bar\mystuff" "\mybackups" -r

Result: All files in mystuff, including subdirectories, are recursively copied into mybackups, which resides in Google Drive's root directory.

.\gdrive-stash.ps1 "C:\foo\bar\mystuff" "1Fn7xLIHE_iIY8o5MHbjQaAX20PdnE0ZD" -r -i

Result: All files in mystuff, including subdirectories, are recursively copied into the directory with Google Drive ID 1Fn7xLIHE_iIY8o5MHbjQaAX20PdnE0ZD.

You can get the Google Drive ID of a file by calling gdrive files list; the first value on each row is the ID. From there, you can get the IDs of subdirectories by calling gdrive files list --parent [ID], using the ID of the subdirectory you want to examine.

Installation

First, make sure that glotlabs's gdrive tool is downloaded, on your path, and configured with Google OAuth Client credentials (this is easy to do with a basic Google account -- see their guide).

Download gdrive-stash.ps1 (slow, Windows only) or gdrive-stash.py (faster, works on Windows, Linux, and MacOS) and call it from the command prompt, use it in a script, or do whatever you want with it. For easy access, you may want to place it in a folder that's on your path.