Can I download a Google Workspace shared drive to a local HDD?
May 23, 2024 1:53 PM Subscribe
I use Google Workspace for work, and would like to start backing up some of the shared drives to a local, physical, 6TB backup drive. Is this possible? How?
I have Google Drive for Desktop installed, but it lives on my laptop HDD, which is tiny. Changing the settings to "always offline" and then backing that up seems cludgy, and trying to drag-and-drop gives me a bunch of errors anyway.
I'm not afraid of command-line stuff, so if there were a way to customize an rclone script to do this, I'd be happy to experiment, but I don't know enough to write that kind of thing myself... or even if it's possible.
I have Google Drive for Desktop installed, but it lives on my laptop HDD, which is tiny. Changing the settings to "always offline" and then backing that up seems cludgy, and trying to drag-and-drop gives me a bunch of errors anyway.
I'm not afraid of command-line stuff, so if there were a way to customize an rclone script to do this, I'd be happy to experiment, but I don't know enough to write that kind of thing myself... or even if it's possible.
Best answer: Yes rclone will backup Shared Drives in Google Workspace, and you shouldn't even need to do any scripting — just set up a cron job to run something like
You'll need to decide if you want to use rclone sync or rclone copy. When a file is deleted in the shared drive, rclone sync will delete it from your local backup. rclone copy won't.
Rclone is an excellent swiss army knife for solving problems like this, but be sure to read the documentation for gotchas, watch out for trailing slashes, and test it with --dry-run before you put live data at risk. And periodically test restoring your backups, of course!
I find rclone more transparent and reliable than Google's Drive software which has occasional worrying sync errors.
If you're on Windows, I find WSL2 makes tools like rclone way easier to interact with, but pure Windows is supported too.
posted by Klipspringer at 2:44 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]
rclone sync your_remote:your_shared_drive /mnt/6TB/backup on schedule). rclone config walks you through the setup process. I have rclone jobs for various AWS and Backblaze backup tasks like this.You'll need to decide if you want to use rclone sync or rclone copy. When a file is deleted in the shared drive, rclone sync will delete it from your local backup. rclone copy won't.
Rclone is an excellent swiss army knife for solving problems like this, but be sure to read the documentation for gotchas, watch out for trailing slashes, and test it with --dry-run before you put live data at risk. And periodically test restoring your backups, of course!
I find rclone more transparent and reliable than Google's Drive software which has occasional worrying sync errors.
If you're on Windows, I find WSL2 makes tools like rclone way easier to interact with, but pure Windows is supported too.
posted by Klipspringer at 2:44 PM on May 23 [2 favorites]
Seconding rclone. Great tool, exactly right for this job.
As a bonus, once you've figured out a suitable rclone workflow for your Google drive, you can use exactly the same workflow with pretty much any cloud storage provider just by running rclone config against your account on it to set up a name that rclone knows it by.
If you've got a half-decent NAS, rclone will probably run on that as well, giving you a way to kick off lengthy backup sessions that don't even need to involve your laptop.
posted by flabdablet at 3:26 AM on May 24
As a bonus, once you've figured out a suitable rclone workflow for your Google drive, you can use exactly the same workflow with pretty much any cloud storage provider just by running rclone config against your account on it to set up a name that rclone knows it by.
If you've got a half-decent NAS, rclone will probably run on that as well, giving you a way to kick off lengthy backup sessions that don't even need to involve your laptop.
posted by flabdablet at 3:26 AM on May 24
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posted by ssg at 2:42 PM on May 23