The Mini isn’t the worst thing to have going, but it also isn’t your only option if you want to be a little more green. First and foremost is that, at least in my setup, it means one more device powered up. I didn’t quite nail the security camera’s sensitivity level and woke up to more than 10,400 images synced to Google Drive.īut, are there downsides? Of course.
Now, anytime you write to /Users/username/googleDrive, you will actually be writing to your Google Drive folder. That means, if you use this path in your FTP configuration, you are essentially writing to Google Drive using FTP. The backslash (“\”) escapes the space in a *nix environment. I ran a command like this to create a space-free symlink: A symlink (or a shortcut in Windows) took care of this. However, if like me, your camera or other client doesn’t play nicely with spaces. Google Drive content will be accessible at /Users/username/Google Drive. The next step is pretty simple: Download and install the Google Drive app (tip: limit the folders Google Drive will sync if this will be a single-use computer/server). If you want to use a Mac for this exercise and you have a newer OS installed, you may need to follow these steps.įirst half of your work? Done. Modify permissions and paths to your liking.The older versions of OSX make it really simple to get an FTP server up and running, which is the boat I found myself in: Google Drive seemed like an excellent storage solution, but there was no way for the camera to utilize it… Directly.Īt some point, I remembered I had a 2006 Mac Mini sitting around. But, I didn’t have something reliable in the cloud handy and for the right price. I’ve been playing recently with a wireless security camera that can send images to an FTP server fairly easily. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. Let’s be clear that Google Drive does not provide FTP access to your content.