OMG! I am just left with a few more GBs on my hard disk...What to do?

- Should I buy a new hard drive?

- Ahh! it will cost a heavy buck. Not possible now.

- Should I remove a few files from the drive?

- Sorry...Can't allow you to do that. All the files are important. Some files removed from the Download folder will only give a few extra MBs. Nothing Much.

.......................So many thoughts, but none is feasible at that particular moment.

Wait!! Can I mount my cloud Google Drive to my own physical system? Is that even possible?

The answer is, YES! You can mount a cloud drive like Google Drive of any space (as per your subscription usage) and that will act like another physical drive only. Without much talk, let's do it.

Google Drive has launched a FUSE-based file system that allows users to access files and folders in google drive through command line as well as the File Explorer. Here our solution is basically an application of that FUSE-based library only.

Install google-drive-ocamlfuse on Ubuntu Linux

Run the following command to install google-drive-ocamlfuse on Ubuntu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/google-drive-ocamlfuse-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

Mounting Google Drive on Ubuntu Linux

Launch google-drive-ocamlfuse to set your Google Drive folder.

google-drive-ocamlfuse

Authorize the ocamlfuse system to access files and folders on your google drive. When you Launch google-drive-ocamlfuse it will launch your regular browser and prompt you to log in to your Google account, where the user needs to sign-in and provide the required access. You’ll receive a success message if it’s successful. The browser can now be closed.

Create a mount point for Google Drive

Let’s make a subdirectory under the home folder.

mkdir ~/ytiam_g_drive

To inform google-drive-ocamlfuse to mount your Google Drive folder at the specified location, run the following command.

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/ytiam_g_drive 

Check if the directory is mounted:

see the last entry. The Drive is mounted now :-)

Now, you can do all sorts of file operations with the files in your G-Drive, as you do with any normal hard disk in your computer system.

Note: Remember whenever you do a system shutoff, the G-Drive will be auto-unmounted from the local system. You need to re-mount it when you start back the system again using the following code,

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/ytiam_g_drive 

Thats it. You are ready to rock and roll again. Happy learning. Cheers!