I'm trying to set up FTP access to my Google Drive, and I've found some questions like this one saying that you can create an FTP server locally using google-drive-ftp-adaptor, but this isn't what I want. I'm looking for something like ftp://drive.google.com or some other way to host my Google Drive globally without creating my own intermediate server.
2 Answers
If what you're looking for is to allow anyone to FTP directly to Google's servers, or to do a simple one-click solution on the web somewhere, then the answer is no, that is not currently possible. The best way to do it is to use rclone as @RulonRock mentioned, or to use google-drive-ftp-adaptor per the answer you linked. However, both of these solutions will only allow users on the computer running rclone or google-drive-ftp-adaptor to access your drive via FTP by without additional configuration.
If you want to set up FTP access to a Google Drive without needing to configure rclone for every single user's computer, you will need to set up a server with a static IP address to run rclone serve ftp gdrive:<your drive here> and then configure that server to allow FTP access to your drive from the internet. The way to do this varies based on where your server is hosted, the server's operating system, and how you want to secure FTP access to the drive.
Welcome! Rclone is the way to go regarding this. I personally use it daily (not for ftp, but in a similar fashion) and it would be able to handle this without issues. The Rclone website is very helpful, and if you are able to use any command line, you should be able to set it up. In a simplified explanation, your are setting up google drive as your "remote", and then using the Rclone serve command to start a local FTP server which then you can port forward if desired. Below I have linked pages regarding Google Drive and FTP.
Here is an example of the command to crate an ftp server that is in a folder titled "Homework" inside the root directory of your drive.(not tested and would need to be changed for your specific setup)
rclone serve ftp gdrive:Homework Links to relevant pages:
FTP Serve:
Google Drive Configuration:
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