Map network drive for Google Drive to appears as a normal drive in Windows Explorer

Question

Is it possible to "map network drive" for Google Drive so it appears as a usual Windows drive in Explorer?

(And on a Mac and Linux?)

Solution 1

Mountain Duck will map Google drive as a network drive - according to the Mountain Duck website :

Mountain Duck lets you mount server and cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS and the File Explorer on Windows. Open remote files with any application and work like on a local volume.

Note that this is a paid-for app. But it has a flexible license if you yourself want to use it on all your machines - https://mountainduck.io/buy/ :

One license can be used on any number of computers as long as it is the same user accessing the software

Available for both Mac and PC.

Another app work looking at is InSync - this doesn't mount a cloud drive like Mountain Duck, but it does provide more features than Google's own drive app, plus it's available on Linux as well as Mac and Windows.

I don't work for them nor have any financial interest.

Making this answer the accepted.

Solution 2

No just a folder. Well you could use the subst command to map a folder as drive letter I guess. Haven't tested it, google drive might do something special, syntax wrong somewhere etc.

subst g: "c:\users\username\Google Drive"

Change "username" to your user name of course. Run at startup using a bat-file perhaps i autostart or similar.

I'm curious, why a drive, not OK with just a folder? Multiple users sharing perhaps? If so permissions might be needed to be set.

Update: I got curious and tried it and it seems to work.

Solution 3

Linux support is on its way apparently. and will no doubt use webdav (possibly FTP too). Windows, OSX and Linux all support mounting webdav based file systems (you use davfs2 under linux).

There will also be a syncing client for linux that means the files will be available when the network is not (the same way the Windows and OSX clients work).

Comments

[Admin]

When you install the Google Drive client app, is it possible to specify a different location for the local folder (other than c:\users\username\Google Drive)? Can you specify a NAS drive letter on your local network (like a Z: drive mapped to a Synology NAS)? Or, after the Google Drive client app is installed, is there a way to change the path for the local folder to a NAS drive letter?

[therobyouknow]

+1 @Bennett Herring - good questions! superuser.com user Pulsar (below) suggests using subst - would that work for you?

[Dan Atkinson]

I'd love to know if it's possible to mount Google Drive as a drive due to serious lack of space on my machine.

[Mattias Isegran Bergander]

@BennettHerring you can specify where google drive should store the files in the google drive app settings.

[Mattias Isegran Bergander]

Actually you can persist the subst command across reboots: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subst#Persisting_across_reboots

[therobyouknow]

+1 This is good enough. But the steps to getting c:\users\username\Google Drive in the first place aren't shown - presumably this Google Drive has a client app to get this path. What is c:\users\username\Google Drive actually? This looks like a local path on the machine not the network location of Google Drive itself.

[Mattias Isegran Bergander]

Google drive indeed has a client app, just like dropbox etc. That app creates and uses that path. You can download the google drive app from your google drive account below the menu to the left: drive.google.com

[therobyouknow]

Accepted, I think this covers it.

[therobyouknow]

+1 For the info on the OSs webdav mount capability - I presume Google Drive supports webdav too.

[therobyouknow]

Thank you for your input an time, @Mattias Isegran Bergander, since asking this question, I have found an app, Mountain Duck, that does do the mount of a remote cloud drive and now make this as the accepted answer, as it is the closest app/solution to my needs.