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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T15:24:22+00:00

Now that Google Drive has launched I wondered if it is possible to integrate

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Now that Google Drive has launched I wondered if it is possible to integrate other filesystems directly into it. I think about something like a FUSE or DOKAN for Google Drive. While Google Drive would be the Root Filesystem, others could be integrated in form of a folder.

For example, one could mount DropBox into Google Drive and then access his DropBox files right through any Google Drive client.

Get the idea?

This would also allow the people to use storage of their own servers & add it to Google Drive. This would make it more private & secure while they can benefit from all advantages provided by Google Drive.

Do you know if creating something like that is possible through the Google Drive API?
If not, how likely is it that such a functionality will be added in the future?

Google Drive, or any other web storage service that implements this feature first could become THE WEB FILESYSTEM. All webservices would only have to support one such service, while the support for all other filesystems is achieved by such filesystem extensions.

This would be the future of the web.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I’m reading through some of your comments on the answers, as well as your original post. I’m not sure if we’re on the same page about what a “file system” is. (I’m not sure I know what it is for sure, but I’ll try to lay out a few things, and other people can correct me.)

    A file system may have:

    1. some binary data, files, directory structures, etc.
    2. some meta-data, such as indexes on 1. above
    3. Additionally we might want to include in the broader definition: some computational logic (a specification (spec) and a “driver” that implements the spec) which tells a computer what the rules are, for reading/writing data to 1. and 2..

    If we regard Gdrive as a file system, the driver spec is Google’s List API documentation, and any app that implements that documentation is essentially a “Gdrive driver” ; likewise, if we regard Dropbox as a file system, the driver spec is the Dropbox API documentation, and any app that implements that documentation is a “Dropbox driver”.

    Now I’m going to ask, where do you plan to implement your drivers? You and I certainly can’t implement a Dropbox driver on the Gdrive server cluster – I don’t think Google will let us do that yet (though perhaps they will one day). So seeing your Dropbox folder mounted as a folder in your Gdrive “on the cloud”, which is what you view in the standard https://drive.google.com user-interface isn’t going to happen anytime soon. (Nor is seeing your Gdrive mounted in your Dropbox folder “on the cloud” on the latter’s website.)

    However, you certainly can implement both the Dropbox and Gdrive drivers on your personal computing client devices (desktop / notebook / phone / tablet / etc.). So your client can access both Dropbox’s and Gdrive’s “cloud” storage, and sync data from each of those, to the same folder on your client’s disk drive. (I’m almost certain that they’ve issued advice that doing this will result in “undefined” behavior, but you can give it a shot.)

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