Backyard Pi Google Drive

Overview

• This article only discusses the rclone config.
• For the copymotion script below it is assumed that the directory from which the Google Drive is configured to serve the files is /motion. You should adapt the script as appropriate if you configure the Google Drive to share a different directory for motion files.
• We further assume that the rclone ‘remote’ is called google-drive-motion for this server.

Security

• For the ID of the root folder prompt for rclone config you may wish to first create a folder (e.g. motion-root) in Google Drive and use the Folder ID as the ID of the root folder. This will limit rclone’s access to that folder. You would then make /motion-root/motion shared with whomever you wish to share the motion files (public is an option for this), but the script would still use google-drive-motion:/motion as the path. See the Google Drive backend documentation for Rclone for more details.

Configuring the Pi

Create an rclone config

To create an new rclone remote as the motion user, execute:

sudo -H -u motion rclone config

choosing Google Drive as the backend and answering the prompts appropriately. (Do not configure as a ‘Shared Drive (Team Drive)’).

If you are running ‘headless’ (that is without graphical interface and can’t use a browser on the Pi) you will need to follow the instructions for remote authorization, which requires you follow the link provided by rclone on a computer with a browser and to copy the resulting authorization code back into the config prompt on the Pi.

Add a copymotion script

A copymotion script for copying to a remote web server directory when using the above autocopy configuration in /etc/motion/motion.conf

Copy this script to /usr/local/bin/copymotion

#!/bin/sh

( rclone copy /var/lib/motion/data google-drive-motion:/motion & )

NB This script assumes you have configured the destination for videos and photos to be /var/lib/motion/data NOT /var/lib/motion (which is the default). This is because the rclone config lives in /var/lib/motion/.config and we do not want to copy it to a public Google Drive folder.