Sync Obsidian with Google Drive on Ubuntu

Mounting Obsidian Vault in google drive using GNOME online account option will not working. The reason because the files in Nautilus cryptic with hash names (literal how Google Drive store our files) without context translation (this part is missing). Also, using this approach the files usually being stream rather persist.

Alternatively, mount GDrive using google-drive-ocamlfuse` solved this problem. Here are 4 quicksteps to do it.

1. Install google-drive-ocamlfuse

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

2. Enable your Google Drive API (important!)

Go to https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/api/drive.googleapis.com and enable API.

3. Create ID and Secret credentials

Choose “OAuth clientID and Choose “Desktop App”

4. Ready to mount

Create a new folder, initialize google-drive-ocamlfuse and mount your drive

# create folder google-drive at home path
cd ~/ && mkdir GoogleDrive

# initialize 
google-drive-ocamlfuse -id [id from step 3] -secret [secret from the step 3]

# mount your drive
google-drive-ocamlfuse GoogleDrive

Voila! you can open the folder and point your Obsidian into this folder.

To always load Google Drive at startup, you can create a startup program

google-drive-ocamlfuse "<YOURPATH>/GoogleDrive"

Bonus to create Obsidian shortcut application and image

vim ~/.local/share/applications/obsidian.desktop

# Insert this and replace the path to your obsidian

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Obsidian
Exec=/home/me/Obsidian-1.6.7.AppImage
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Icon=/home/me/obsidian.png
StartupWMClass=obsidian
X-AppImage-Version=0.8.15
Comment=Obsidian
Categories=Office;
MimeType=text/html;x-scheme-handler/obsidian;

Obsidian png