Google Cloud Storage

Google Cloud Storage, mounted as a drive.

Mount Google Cloud Storage buckets as a native drive on macOS, Windows, and Linux. OAuth-based authentication into your Google Cloud project, every storage class supported, no S3 emulation in the way.

— What you get

GCS buckets as drives.

Buckets mount as drives.

Every Cloud Storage bucket you can access appears in Finder, Explorer, or your Linux file manager. Open files in any app, save back directly to GCS. No upload step.

OAuth into your GCP project.

Sign in with your Google account. ExpanDrive uses the standard OAuth flow — your IAM role on the project determines what buckets you can mount. No HMAC keys to manage, no secret files on disk.

Every storage class.

Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive buckets all mount the same way. Cold-class retrieval is slower (that's the trade-off you paid for); ExpanDrive surfaces the latency without breaking the mount.

— Why mount GCS as a drive

The desktop access GCS doesn't ship.

Google's official path to Cloud Storage from a desktop is `gcloud storage` (CLI) or `gsutil` — both excellent for scripts, neither a drive. ExpanDrive fills that gap.

Open in any app.

Standard `gcloud storage cp` is fine for batch transfers — but you can't double-click a PDF in a bucket and have it open in Preview. With ExpanDrive, you can. Every desktop app sees GCS as the filesystem.

No HMAC key sprawl.

GCS's S3 compatibility requires HMAC keys, which become a credential-management problem at scale. ExpanDrive uses OAuth into the native GCS API instead — no per-user HMAC keys, no secret files on disk.

— Cross-platform

GCS on every OS your team runs.

macOS

Apple File Provider extension. Buckets appear in Finder and ~/Library/CloudStorage. Apple Silicon native.

Windows

User-selectable drive letter per bucket. Signed MSI installer for fleet deployment.

Linux

Native .deb / .rpm packages with signed apt and yum repositories. Buckets mount at standard Linux mount points.

— Common questions

Common questions about Google Cloud Storage on ExpanDrive.

OAuth, IAM, storage classes, and the difference between this and using S3-compatibility against GCS.

The native GCS API, via OAuth. Google offers an S3-compatible interface to GCS (XML API with HMAC keys), but going native means no HMAC keys to manage, full support for GCS-specific features (Object Lifecycle, customer-managed encryption keys, requester-pays buckets), and the same Google identity you use for the rest of GCP.

Need a File Orchestration Platform, not just a drive?

The cloud connectors mounting your drive on macOS, Windows, and Linux are the same ones that run on Files.com's high-performance cloud File Orchestration Platform — used by 4,000+ businesses including Equifax, Rag & Bone, Cognizant, and Michelin. If you need automations, audit logs, SFTP / AS2 servers, or compliance reporting on top of your file estate, that lives there.

Try it free.
Mount everything.

Free for personal use. Runs on every Mac, PC, and Linux box built in the last decade.