Dropbox As Wormhole Between Ubuntu & Google Drive!

I use Ubuntu on multiple computers everyday. It is important to keep various files synced across them. I keep most of the public data in github repositories and it is very easy to sync across multiple machines.

Google Drive gives 15GB of space with free account. I have multiple accounts and that space is enough to backup my data. I have been storing lots of files in Google Drive from past few years. The main problem is that Google Drive doesn't have a Linux client. To add files, I need to open a web page and then select files to upload and wait until its done. There are few 3rd party clients and none of them work well. So, it is very difficult to sync them across multiple computers.

Dropbox gives 5GB of space with free account. It has Linux client and it works very well. But 5GB of space is not sufficient to store my data.

It is quite difficult to pick one among them as I need benefits of both for free.

Even though I have lot of data, I dont want all of it to sync to all computers everyday. Nearly 90% of data is just backup. Only 10% of data needs to be synced between multiple computers. So I decided to use dropbox as a frontend to google drive.

I have created 2 folders, say Daily & Backup in Dropbox.

Whatever I add to Daily folder will be in Dropbox and it will sync across multiple machines.

There is an amazing service called IFTTT which will help you to connect two products/apps. I found a IFTTT recipe which will add dropbox files in one folder to Google drive.

I have connected Backup folder in Dropbox to Google Drive. Whenever I add a file to Backup folder in Dropbox, it gets added to Google Drive. Once in a week, I will delete files in Backup directory so that Dropbox won't run out of space. So Backup folder will serve as a wormhole to transfer files into Google Drive from my system.

Since I have multiple Google accounts, I have created multiple folders in Dropbox and all folders will be synced to corresponding Google Drive folders.

This setup works well for me as I have Dropbox's Linux client and sufficient storage to backup data to Google Drive.