GSync -- RSync for Google Drive

Copyright (C) 2013-2014 Craig Phillips. All rights reserved.

Google currently don't produce a Linux variant of their client for Google Drive. This is my implementation of a multiplatform, command line tool that for the most part, is intended to behave much like rsync. I aim to follow the same functional implementation of rsync and also provide the same features, enabled or disabled through a similar interface of command line options.

There was a close contender for being a suitable client called grive. This is ideal if you only intend to sync a small library of files or if the files being synchronised are small in size. I found the client to be unreliable in other cases, crashing and failing to synchronise very little. I looked over much of the code and found that it favours preloading with a hash of the directory to be synchronised and all sub directories, before it even synchronises any files. This creates a scenario where synchronisation will never take place if the preloading fails. Instead, I will opt to process directories depth first and sequentially in order to allow synchronisation to occur immediately.

The only prerequisite is that you have Python. The makefile will take care of installing any required Python libraries using pip, which will also be obtained.

Donations:

If you like the software, don't forget to donate to further development of it!

https://github.com/iwonbigbro/gsync/wiki/Donate

My Blog:

http://mud-slide.blogspot.co.uk/

Installation:

The GSync package is now available on (pypi.python.org). It can be installed using pip. I recommend using pip over easy_install or pypi-install, since pip takes care of dependencies through setuptools. I have found that easy_install only checks for dependencies but doesn't actually install them. On Debian I installed using the following steps:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install gsync

To upgrade GSync, you can run pip with the --upgrade option:

sudo pip install --upgrade gsync

That's it. GSync will be installed along with any required packages.

Authentication:

Authentication occurs just once, the first time a connection is established with your drive. To establish a connection, just specify the --authenticate option with no other options or arguments:

gsync --authenticate

Or alternatively, just specify a drive source or destination file like:

gsync drive://somepath/in/your/drive ~/some/local/path

It will provide a URL for which you can obtain a GUID from Google that you paste into the command line prompt. Once authenticated, it caches the GUID in your ~/.gsync directory. To force authentication, just remove this directory.

See: https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2

RSync options implemented so far:

 -v, --verbose               enable verbose output
     --debug                 enable debug output
 -q, --quiet                 suppress non-error messages
 -c, --checksum              skip based on checksum, not mod-time & size
 -r, --recursive             recurse into directories
 -R, --relative              use relative path names
 -u, --update                skip files that are newer on the receiver
 -d, --dirs                  transfer directories without recursing
 -g, --group                 preserve group
 -o, --owner                 preserve owner (super-user only)
 -p, --perms                 preserve permissions
 -i, --itemize-changes       output a change-summary for all updates
     --progress              show progress during transfer

For a list of known issues:

https://github.com/iwonbigbro/gsync/issues?state=open