It's easy to download a folder from Google Drive on to your PC or Mac computer, and the process is the same regardless of your device. This story is a part of Business Insider's Guide to Google Drive. How to Change the Default Gmail Account in Chrome on a Windows or Mac PC Whether you are a Windows or a Mac user, you will be happy to know that things work the same on both platforms.
Google Drive integrates directly into Windows Explorer (we’ll be using Microsoft Windows for these screenshots, but the desktop app is available for Mac OS X as well as mobile devices) which makes it appear as just another location on your computer; there will be a Google Drive folder under your user account in Windows Explorer.
MacOS - Using multiple Google Drive accounts at the same time- 30 June 2013
Warning: this solution is no longer available on newer version of OSX. Itested it on Mac OS 10.6 long time ago. Please don’t ask me about any problemabout it because I use only one Google Drive account now :)
For several months, I have been using only one Google account for storing andsyncing my files between computers. It is really a great tool since it’sintegrated deeply with many Google services (which I use everyday). However, thestorage is a problem for most cloud drive service. Before that, it offers only5GB for free and now 15GB, still not enough for me even when I use the emailthat my university provided (with the capacity up to 30GB for free). Today, whileI was browsing my Google Drive, I suddenly thought that it would be very nice ifI can combine all my Google accounts’ storage capacity because I have 4 dailyused Google accounts. The problem is that Google has restricted the Google Drivedesktop app to be able to run one single instance with one profile at one time.That led to the inconvience when I have to disconnect and then re-login intoanother account and select the right folder for it everytime I want to changeaccount.
Finally, after a whole hour Google searching for a solution to use multipleGDrive accounts without any results, I decided to do it on my own. Luckily,after spending all of my weekend afternoon researching shell commands, I havesuccessfully come up with a nearly perfect solution for using multiple GoogleDrive accounts on my Mac.
- A computer running MacOS
- A little knowledge about shell commands (not much)
- More than one Google accounts
- Google Drive desktop app for Mac (installed in /Applications)
Let me briefly explain how my solution work. Actually, each user account onMacOS can only run one instance of Google Drive at one time. However, I realizedthat if I run it as another account user (this user can be hidden so that itwon’t affect you), it will have to create another profilesince the Unix system has separate home folder for each account. The problemnow is just how to run all of those instances simutaneously. By applying somesimple shell commands and apple script, we can force MacOS to do all thosestuffs for us.
As I mentioned before, you need Google Drive desktop app installed in/Applications. This is just to make sure that every user account can havesufficient access to the application.
For ease of multiple accounts management, I advised you to create a folder whereyou will store all of your GDrive accounts’s folders. In this article, I’ll callthat folder Google Drive Shared, located in my home directory.
After finishing installing Google Drive, you can open it and login with one ofyour Google account, create a new folder inside that Google Drive Sharedfolder above and tell GDrive to select it as the sync folder fo that account.
You have finished adding the first account. There is nothing new as you justfollow the normal steps when you want to use GDrive. Now, move to the trickierpart, where you have to create another user for extra accounts. Don’t worry, youonly have to do this once.
Open up System Preferences, go to User & Groups, click the + buttonto add one more user account.
How To Change User On Google Drive App Macbook Pro
For the account type, select Standard. You can then input everything in Fullname field and Password Hint because we will later hide those information.You can also choose any account name and password, just remember to write themdown, we will need them later.
From this step, you will need Terminal. We will do most of our work usingcommand line interface.
Firstly, you need to create another folder inside Google Drive Shared to storethe sync folder for the new account. See example in the picture below
Next, you need to change the permission of the Google Drive Shared folder to777 so that all user have the permission to read/write inside that folder.
Execute this command in terminal, replace/path/to/Google-Drive-Shared/folder with the path to your Google DriveShared folder.
Finally, execute this command to run Google Drive as the newly created user.Replace username with the account name you have chosen before.
Now GDrive is ready for you to use.
How To Change User On Google Drive App Mac Download
For the first time, a popup window will appear asking you for username andpassword. After logging in, remember to select Advanced Setup to change thedefault sync folder location.
Change the default sync location to the newly created folder
Again, for the first time only, another popup window will appear asking you toreset to default keychain, just select Reset To Defaults.
Everything’s done now and Google Drive is ready to run with multiple accounts.If you find it’s too complicated and you feel lazy typing these commands againand again, head to the next section where I’ll show you how to automate everything.
/GoogleDriveAdvance-58b9d67e5f9b58af5cab3d99.jpg "How To Change User On Google Drive App Mac")
It will not be a convinience method if you have to type all those commands againand again everytime you need start the computer. Instead, we will use Automatoralong with a shell script file to make everything automatically work in thebackground.
How To Change User On Google Drive App Mac Osx
Open a text editor, create a file name run_google_drive.sh in your homefolder. Paste this intothe file content (just the commands you have executed before)
Replace /path/to/Google-Drive-Shared/folder with the path to yourGoogle Drive Shared folder. Replace username with the account nameof the account you have created.
How To Change User On Google Drive App Mac Os
After saving the file, go back to terminal and execute this command to make thefile executable.
Next, open Automator, create a new workflow, select Run Apple Script,paste this script into Automator
Replace path/to/run_gooel_drive.sh with the path to the run_google_drive.shfile you’ve just created. Replace sudopassword with your sudo password. Savethe workflow as an application. Now what you have to do is to run thatapplication and your Google Drive instance will start. You can also select thatapplication to start with the OS so that you don’t have to do anything, allGdrive will be in synced whenever you start your computer.
Later, when you want to add more GDrive account, just create a new user and thencreate 2 file as above.
We only need those extra users for GDrive, there is no need for themto show up in System Preferences or Logon Screen. This command will force MacOSto hide all user with User ID less then 500.
You need to change the account id to a number less than 500 in order to hide it.First check if the id is already in use by typing this command
For example, you want to change the user id to 402, execute the above commandand search for the user id 402 in the output. If there is no match result, thatmeans that user id is available and you can use it.
To change the user id, go to System Preferences, User & Group, rightclick on the account you want to change and select Advanced Options and thenchange the user id number.
- Proxifier: if you are connecting to a network through Proxifier, this methodwill not work.
- Total Finder: Total Finder auto quit when start GDrive as another user. Youcan then re-open it later. This is not a big problem.