Google Drive accounts support a hidden Application Data Folder, “appDataFolder”:
The ‘Application Data folder’ is a special folder that is only accessible by your application. Its content is hidden from the user, and from other apps. Despite being hidden from the user, the Application Data folder is stored on the user’s Drive and therefore uses the user’s Drive storage quota. The Application Data folder can be used to store configuration files, saved games data, or any other types of files that the user should not directly interact with.
It would be great if rclone could be updated to support appDataFolder, so that data in this folder can be read/copied/synced/etc.
The use case I’m thinking of primarily is Arq, which supports storing its backups in appDataFolder, but doesn’t currently have a way to move the data from there to anywhere else (either to the root folder of Google Drive, or to another remote target). I was hoping I could use rclone to move Arq data from this folder elsewhere, but it seems rclone needs to be updated to support appDataFolder first.
@ncw - I’m not sure - not a developer myself, just a user.
The more I’ve read about the issue though, I don’t think it’s actually gonna be possible to achieve what I was hoping for (i.e. for rclone to be able to access the entire appDataFolder) - from reading the doc I linked in my original post, it seems implementing appDataFolder support only allows a given app to access its own data within appDataFolder, so it can store its own settings and data in a way that is invisible to the user, and other apps.
I’m not sure my intended use case is possible - i.e. rclone being able to access appDataFolder data created by other apps (specifically, Arq).
