Need to access your Google Drive like a regular folder on your Linux system? You can. By mounting it as a virtual file system, you get full access to your files without opening a browser or syncing everything locally.

Here’s how to do it—quick, clean, and reliable.

🔧 What You’ll Need

• A Google account
• A Linux system (Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.)
• A package called rclone

🛠️ Step-by-Step Guide

1. Install rclone

rclone is the go-to tool for syncing and mounting cloud storage in Linux.

On Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install rclone

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install rclone

On Arch:

sudo pacman -S rclone

2. Configure Google Drive

Run:

rclone config

Follow the interactive setup:

• Choose n for a new remote
• Name it something like gdrive
• Choose drive as the storage type
• Use auto-config to authorize in your browser
• Choose defaults unless you need advanced options

When you’re done, it saves the config to ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf.

3. Create a Mount Point

Pick a local folder where Google Drive will show up:

mkdir -p ~/GoogleDrive

4. Mount Google Drive

You can now mount your drive like this:

rclone mount gdrive: ~/GoogleDrive --vfs-cache-mode writes

• gdrive: is the name you gave your remote
• --vfs-cache-mode writes is recommended so apps can write properly

Note: This command runs in the foreground. Open a new terminal tab or add & to run in the background.

5. (Optional) Mount Google Drive at Startup

To auto-mount your drive on boot, create a systemd service or add the rclone mount command to your startup applications.

Example systemd service (basic idea):

[Unit]
Description=Mount Google Drive
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount gdrive: /home/youruser/GoogleDrive --vfs-cache-mode writes
Restart=always
User=youruser

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Save as /etc/systemd/system/gdrive.service, enable it with:

sudo systemctl enable --now gdrive

🧠 Heads-Up

• This does not sync files locally. It acts like a live stream from Drive.
• You must be online to use it.
• File performance depends on your connection and Google’s API.

✅ Done

You now have Google Drive mounted like a native folder in Linux. It’s fast, flexible, and doesn’t require installing Drive’s heavy desktop client.