plexdrive · Whatbox

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Plexdrive "mounts your Google Drive as a FUSE filesystem (optimized for media playback)."

We advise using rclone instead of plexdrive as it has active development, more features, and a larger user community.

Plexdrive is a read-only FUSE mount program. It will not work for programs that try to write to the FUSE mount. It should only be used with media playback programs or downloading to your local computer or other storage.

Installation

Connect to your slot via SSH

Download Plexdrive

 mkdir -p ~/bin; wget -O ~/bin/plexdrive https://github.com/plexdrive/plexdrive/releases/download/5.2.1/plexdrive-linux-amd64

Make the binary executable.
```
 chmod +x ~/bin/plexdrive
```

If ~/bin is not in your PATH already, add it.

  echo "PATH=\$HOME/bin:\$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

Create a directory that you will mount the remote storage to.
```
 mkdir ~/mountedfolder
```

Change mountedfolder to any name that you want to use.

Configuration

You will need to create a Google Drive client ID and client secret. Instructions for doing this can be seen here.

Usage

Beginning with version 5 of Plexdrive, default settings are based on the hardware it is being ran on. Our HDD and SSD plans are very powerful, and in fact too powerful because the high default values do not work well with Plexdrive. It is recommended to mount with the following parameters:
plexdrive mount -v 3 --chunk-check-threads=16 --chunk-load-threads=16 --chunk-load-ahead=16 --max-chunks=256 /home/user/mountedfolder/
This will run in the foreground, and will consequently be shutdown if you close your terminal.

To have it run in the background and remain running after you close your terminal, use screen:
screen -dmS plexdrive plexdrive mount -v 3 --chunk-check-threads=16 --chunk-load-threads=16 --chunk-load-ahead=16 --max-chunks=256 /home/user/mountedfolder/

To view its output, attach to the screen with screen -x plexdrive. To detach from the screen, use Ctrl+a and then d.

Unmount with
fusermount -u ~/mountedfolder

Notes

Do not use FUSE-mounted folders with BitTorrent clients.

You will always receive the following error when using FUSE mounts without root privileges. This is fine and it can be ignored. The error is:
mount helper error: fusermount: failed to open /etc/mtab: Permission denied

Many guides on the Internet have said to use the "allow_other" parameter, however you should not do this. This is only intended for when Plex runs on its own user account, and on a shared system it would mean other users being able to access your mounted data. We have this module disabled and you will receive errors if trying to use it.

If you receive this error:
mount helper error: fusermount: failed to chdir to mountpoint: Permission denied
It means that the mountpoint is broken. Forcefully unmount it with fusermount -u ~/mountedfolder and then mount again normally.

If you receive this error: mount helper error: fusermount: failed to chdir to mountpoint: Permission denied
It means that the directory being mounted to was not created properly. Delete it (for example with rm -r ~/mountedfolder using the default examples from above) and create the directory properly with mkdir ~/mountedfolder

Finally, do not plan on moving data directly to your mounted remote storage, for example with move-on-completion functions in your BitTorrent client. It simply will not work well, and plexdrive is not designed for that. While it can work on occasion, you will encounter issues. You should upload the data to the remote storage first, such as with rclone's copy or move functions. Do not download torrents to mounted remote storage, and do not upload from mounted remote storage.