I recently needed to move a directory of files from Dropbox to Google drive, and apparently nobody wants to make this easy for you. So I rube-goldberg’d it for a one-off transfer.

Preliminaries

Since my whole reason for doing this is to avoid another sync from my home machine, I decided to work with a temporary VM. I fired up a temporary box from dply. Note that this process will require downloading the entirety of your directory on to a machine then uploading the entirety to Google Drive.

Moving out of Dropbox

There are several ways to download files off of Dropbox, since this was a temporary machine, I did a quick search for a Dropbox CLI client and found dbxcli. It’s a little clunky but works with a little snake charming.

Connecting dbxcli to your Dropbox account is a simple process of being provided a link and getting a code to paste back in.

There’s currently a bug which prevents you from get-ing an entire directory. What I did instead was ls the directory on Dropbox that I wanted and massaged the output in to a .sh file that looks like this:

./dbxcli get "/dir of interest/DSC_2199.JPG" local_dir
./dbxcli get "/dir of interest/DSC_2200.JPG" local_dir
./dbxcli get "/dir of interest/DSC_2201.JPG" local_dir
./dbxcli get "/dir of interest/DSC_2202.JPG" local_dir
./dbxcli get "/dir of interest/DSC_2203.JPG" local_dir

Moving in to Google Drive

Using what appeared to be the most mature CLI for Google Drive, aptly named drive, the process of uploading the directory was super simple. Note that there are packages that make installation much simpler.

After linking to your Google account (in a similar manner to how Dropbox worked out), you can simply issue a drive push command (and specify where you want to push) and it’ll do a quick check and ask you if you’re sure. Once you say yes it’ll get uploading and you’re done.