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Work in progress — do not trust Drivel with your only copy. It is unfinished, under-tested, and may lose data. Keep backups you have checked. What this means →
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Using Drivel

Using Drivel

Drivel mounts a folder that is really two things at once: an ordinary local directory you can open, edit and save in, and a folder on a cloud storage provider that syncs in the background. Reads never touch the network. Uploads and downloads happen off to the side. Two backends ship today: Google Drive and SFTP — any server you have an SSH account on.

Caution

Drivel is a work in progress. Do not use it for anything you cannot afford to lose. It is unfinished and under-tested, and it will probably lose data for somebody before it stops being either. Keep backups, make them often, and check that you can restore from them.

Project status is the whole statement: why, what has actually been run, and the sharp edges that are known and not yet fixed.

Start here:

  1. Project status — read this before you point Drivel at anything you care about.
  2. Quickstart — install, log in, mount. About ten minutes, most of it waiting on Google.
  3. Installing — the longer version: building from source, the FUSE helper, shell completions, the man page, and how to uninstall.
  4. Credentials for your backend — Drivel ships none of its own. For Google Drive you create your own OAuth client, which is one-time and free: Google Cloud setup . For SFTP you already have them — it is your SSH key.

Then, as you need them:

  • Configuration — every flag, every config-file key, and how the two relate.
  • SFTP — sync to any machine you can ssh to. No server-side software, and no host key trusted on first use.
  • Lazy mode — make a whole remote tree visible without downloading it, and the filesystem requirement that makes that safe.
  • Data safety — what happens when two machines edit the same file, when Drivel will delete something, and when it refuses to. The rules; project status is how much they have been exercised.
  • Troubleshooting — the errors you are most likely to hit, and what each one means.
  • Platform support — Linux, macOS, FreeBSD; what is verified and what is not.
  • Mounting from /etc/fstab — describe a mount as an fstab line and bring it up with mount -a or at boot, with no terminal attached. Linux only.

The drivel(1) man page is the complete reference for both subcommands: man ./docs/user/drivel.1.

What Drivel is not

It is a client you run yourself: there is no Drivel service, and it ships no credentials of its own. You supply the ones for the backend you point it at, and they stay yours to inspect and revoke.

It is not a caching layer over a network filesystem: the backing directory holds real files, and they stay readable whether or not Drivel is running, whether or not you still have the program. See getting your data out .

Project status