Google Drive data [13TB] to Dropbox OR External Hard Drive

Help and Support
1

Hi all,

I am looking for some help with copying files from Google Drive (g-suite provided by university) to either external hard drive or dropbox. My school will be cancelling my subscription soon as I have graduated and I want to copy all of my 13TB out of it as I do not have a physical backup of that.
I would really appreciate some help regarding this.

Update:
Google Drive: 13TB
Personal Mac: 500GBs
External Hard Drive: 16TB

I want to move everything from Google Drive which is not on my local to External Hard Drive.
The manual process right now is to use the "Backup and Sync (Google Drive)" app on my personal Mac and download up to 450 GBs of data and then copy it to External Hard Drive manually.
Then uncheck those 450GBs files so they get deleted from my Mac, download new set of 450GBs and then repeat the process..

Thanks

2

What's the need for rclone? Is there a reason you wouldn't just drag it from the web UI and drop it on your external drive?

3

The limitation is that my Mac is only 500GB, which means I can only do 450GBs at a time.
Plus, Google Drive does not allow drag and drop..

4

What's your workflow ? I thought you said you were moving to an external drive that can hold it. Is that not the case ?

5

Sorry for the confusion, but my current workflow is:

Google Drive: 13TB
Personal Mac: 500GBs
External Hard Drive: 16TB

I want to move everything from Google Drive which is not on my local to External Hard Drive.
The manual process right now is to use the "Backup and Sync (Google Drive)" app on my personal Mac and download up to 450 GBs of data and then copy it to External Hard Drive manually.
Then uncheck those 450GBs files so they get deleted from my Mac, download new set of 450GBs and then repeat the process..

Also, updated it into the description of the post

6

Ah, ok. Thanks I always forget when you download a folder with the UI, it zips it. Such a silly design.

For that workflow, you can setup a Google Drive remote as described here:

https://rclone.org/drive/

Once you have that setup, you can do something like:

rclone copy GoogleRemote:somefolder /Users/someone/Downloads/targetfolder

and that recursively copyes the whole folder down to the target.

Depending on how you have your folders broken up, you can repeat that multiple times.

If the target has enough space to store it all, you can simple just do:

rclone copy GoogleDrive: /ExternalDrive

rclone can just copy it all to the target and you can skip the middle step all together.

7

Alright, thank you for breaking it up for me.

In other words,

  1. Setup Google Drive Remote: https://rclone.org/drive/
  2. rclone copy GoogleDrive(name of the remote?): /ExternalDrive(replace external drive to name of my external drive?)

I do not want to mess up anything, which is why I am being so specific..

8

Yep, in my case my google drive is called GD in my rclone.conf

Here is example:

felix@gemini:~$ rclone copy GD:hosts .

hosts
felix@gemini:~$ ls -al hosts
-rw-rw-r-- 1 felix felix 254 Sep 12 11:40 hosts
9

Thank you. What command can I run to get the exact name of my external drive?
I want everything from google drive to copy.

10

If you open up a terminal on the mac, you can just 'pwd' in the folder to see what the full path is:

textere@serenity Downloads % pwd
/Users/textere/Downloads
11

Alright, but how do I get the full path for the external drive?
Sorry for noob questions.

I read something about diskutil list

12

If you are in finder, make sure "View -> View Path Bar" is on and that has a bar on the bottom.

Click on the drive on the left in Finder and go to the bottom path and you can click on it and copy path:

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13

Awesome. Thank you.
I will follow these steps in the evening and update the thread.

14

Also, for example, what would happen if the storage on the external drive was running out?

15

If you fill it up? The copy would error out saying there is no available space on the device to write files to.

16

Yes, that is referring to the name of the remote exactly as you wrote it during setup (or manually in the rclone.conf file). For the external drive it's whatever name it would be referenced as by your system. Just don't confuse the label (which has no technical significance) with the path. Rclone will tell you if you try to use an invalid name, so don't worry.

Since this is is a huge amount of data, let me just tell you right off the bat that rclone will gracefully deal with running the same command over several sessions. It will just skip existing files and work on the remaining - so don't feel pressure to do it all in one sitting.

If you wanted to send this data to a Dropbox (or any other type of remote) then it would be exactly the same process except you replace the external drive with a second remote in your command. If that is where you intend to put it eventually anyway then you might as well ... there really is no need to run it through your local storage.

The only concern is I'm not sure how fast dropbox is - nor how much the maximum daily upload limit is (if any). If you are running out of time then this may be something to consider.

17

My end goal is to indeed have a local copy of all my data, as well as a cloud copy.
Therefore, I think I might have it sync to local drive first, and later upload it to Dropbox.

Thank you for all the clarification though!
I will definitely ask more questions once I follow the steps.

18

They gave you warning?

19

Yes. I have been graduated for about 3 years and I believe they finally caught on.

20

I know you aren't asking for this, but if all else fails, Google Takeout might be an option. You can download any or all of your data from Google. That might be handy for stuff that rclone can't copy (anything not in GDrive).