Mount Google Drive on your Seedbox

Learn how to save files on your Google Drive using your Seedbox.

Updated over a week ago

While using your Seedbox you’ve probably faced the following obstacles:

  • You don’t have enough local storage to save downloaded data.

  • Your local speed is not fast enough to download all content.

  • You want to save your content for later use.

All of these you can achieve if you mount Google Drive on your Seedbox! In this tutorial, we will show you how to mount Google Drive with ease, and save your valuable Seedbox content.

This is achieved by a FUSE based file system which makes mounting Google Drive possible on Linux hosts.

Login via Thinlinc

Because we need a GUI to accept the authorization – you’ll need to establish a graphical session. Go to your client area and access your Thinlinc.

Setup rclone

While you are connected via Thinlinc, open a terminal and type:

$ rclone config

rclone has text-based wizard. Since we don't have any 'remote' yet we need to create a new one.

No remotes found, make a new one?
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q>n

Enter a descriptive name.

Enter name for new remote.
name> my-gdrive

rclone will show a list of options of supported remote storage. We choose the Google Drive one

Option Storage.
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value.
1 / 1Fichier
\ (fichier)
2 / Akamai NetStorage
\ (netstorage)
3 / Alias for an existing remote
\ (alias)
4 / Amazon Drive
\ (amazon cloud drive)
5 / Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Providers including AWS, Alibaba, ArvanCloud, Ceph, China Mobile, Cloudflare, GCS, DigitalOcean, Dreamhost, Huawei OBS, IBM COS, IDrive e2, IONOS Cloud, Liara, Lyve Cloud, Minio, Netease, Petabox, RackCorp, Scaleway, SeaweedFS, StackPath, Storj, Tencent COS, Qiniu and Wasabi
\ (s3)
6 / Backblaze B2
\ (b2)
7 / Better checksums for other remotes
\ (hasher)
8 / Box
\ (box)
9 / Cache a remote
\ (cache)
10 / Citrix Sharefile
\ (sharefile)
11 / Combine several remotes into one
\ (combine)
12 / Compress a remote
\ (compress)
13 / Dropbox
\ (dropbox)
14 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
\ (crypt)
15 / Enterprise File Fabric
\ (filefabric)
16 / FTP
\ (ftp)
17 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
\ (google cloud storage)
18 / Google Drive
\ (drive)

We choose Google Drive. client_id and client_secret can left blank.

Storage> 18

Option client_id.
Google Application Client Id
Setting your own is recommended.
See https://rclone.org/drive/#making-your-own-client-id for how to create your own.
If you leave this blank, it will use an internal key which is low performance.
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
client_id>

Option client_secret.
OAuth Client Secret.
Leave blank normally.
Enter a value. Press Enter to leave empty.
client_secret>

We choose the scope of access, We suggest 1 or 2 depending on what you need

Option scope.
Scope that rclone should use when requesting access from drive.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value.
Press Enter to leave empty.
1 / Full access all files, excluding Application Data Folder.
\ (drive)
2 / Read-only access to file metadata and file contents.
\ (drive.readonly)
/ Access to files created by rclone only.
3 | These are visible in the drive website.
| File authorization is revoked when the user deauthorizes the app.
\ (drive.file)
/ Allows read and write access to the Application Data folder.
4 | This is not visible in the drive website.
\ (drive.appfolder)
/ Allows read-only access to file metadata but
5 | does not allow any access to read or download file content.
\ (drive.metadata.readonly)
scope> 2

Answer the rest with default answers. A browser will popup asking you to login to your google account. Give your permission to rclone.

Back to terminal

y) Yes this is OK 
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Now we have Google Drive configured to our rclone.

Setting up mount point

If you intent to share this Google Drive with other linux apps (Plex maybe) it's better to create a mount mount outside your home directory.

sudo mkdir /mnt/my-gdrive
sudo chown user:user /mnt/my-gdrive

Actual Mounting

Now let's mount our Google Drive

rclone mount my-gdrive: /mnt/my-gdrive

By default it's only accessible to you only, if you want to allow other users or apps running under different user

#uncomment user_allow_other
nano /etc/fuse.conf
rclone mount my-gdrive: /mnt/my-gdrive --allow-other

Unmounting

When you're done you can just unmount by using

fusermount -u /mnt/my-gdrive
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