Google Cloud Storage Client

ExpanDrive is a fast and powerful client for Google Cloud Storage and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. It can map a drive directly to a bucket on GCS and also has a full cloud storage browser and uploader that lets you manage your storage.

Google Cloud Storage (GCS) is Google’s object storage offering as part of the Google Cloud Platform. It’s analogous to Amazon’s S3 storage service, part of AWS. It is suitable for both developers and enterprises – offering huge scale and durability.

Like Amazon S3, GCS is primarily and API-driven service, which means there is a lightweight browser and uploader available on the Google Cloud Console. For any heavy lifting or integration with native applications you’re going to want to use a third party client that implements the GCS API, like ExpanDrive.

Getting Started with GCS

Google has a basic getting started guide to get you setup with a Google Cloud Storage account. Once you have an operational account and project, you can open ExpanDrive and add a connection to GCS. Start by clicking the new connection button in the bottom left, and then select Google Cloud Storage and the connection type.

Next ExpanDrive will help you authenticate with the Google Cloud Platform via OAuth. This is a direct connection between you and Google and ExpanDrive doesn’t have access to your credentials at any point. The authentication process ends when Google hands the ExpanDrive app an API token you then use to manage your storage.

Next you’re going to start the authentication process. This is handled by an embedded webview with a direct connection to Google.

After you have authorized ExpanDrive to access your GCS account Google will pass the ExpanDrive app a token it can use to connect and manage your storage. The final step setting up access is provide a project name/number that you want to connect into.

ExpanDrive is now connected to Google Cloud Storage. You can access your buckets as a mounted drive as well as browse them from within the ExpanDrive user interface.

System Requirements

ExpanDrive supports macOS 10.12 or newer and a wide variety of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Centos, Fedora, Redhat, and more. Learn more about how to install ExpanDrive for Linux here.

ExpanDrive runs on Microsoft Windows 7 through Windows 10. Windows Server 2012+ is also supported as well as RDP/Terminal services environments. ExpanDrive can isolate multiple users logged into the same machine so they each have their own view of cloud storage.