Copy Files from NFS to Google Drive: 3 Methods That Work

Why Push NFS Data into Google Drive at All?

NFS shares are brilliant inside the house and useless outside it. A Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, or plain Linux box exports a folder, every machine on the LAN mounts it at wire speed, and then you try to open a file from a coffee shop and remember it lives behind your router. Copying that data into Google Drive fixes the reach problem without touching the NAS itself.

• 📱 Reach it from anywhere — Drive's apps run on every phone and browser. A photo archive or document tree that only existed on /volume1/ becomes searchable from the Drive app on your phone.
• 🤝 Share without opening ports — Handing a client or family member an NFS export means VPNs and firewall rules. Handing them a Drive link takes one click.
• 🏚️ Retire an old NAS — When a five-year-old box is on its way out and you don't want to buy another, Drive's paid tiers are a cheap landing spot for the data that still matters.
• 📄 Work on it in Google's tools — Once a folder of spreadsheets or docs is in Drive, Sheets and Docs can open them in place, and Workspace users get them under the company's admin controls.
• 🗄️ Keep a second copy off-site — A NAS with RAID survives a dead disk, not a house fire. A copy in Google's data centres is the simplest off-site location most people already pay for.

An NFS Share and Google Drive Are Different Animals

One is a network filesystem protocol from 1984 that your OS mounts like a disk; the other is a web service with an API and a quota. That difference decides which tools can even see each side.

🖧 The NFS share

NFS (Network File System) is how Linux servers and most NAS units — Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS, Unraid — export a folder to other machines on the network. Your Mac or PC mounts the export and it shows up as a normal path.

• LAN-speed reads and writes — a gigabit link moves roughly 100 MB/s, far faster than any cloud upload.
• No subscription and no per-GB fee; the limit is the disks in the box.
• Only reachable on the local network (or over a VPN). There is no web app and no share link.
• Permissions are Unix UIDs mapped by the server's export rules, which is where most "Operation not permitted" errors come from.
• Neither Google's web uploader nor rclone has an NFS client built in — the share has to be mounted by the operating system first.

🟡 Google Drive

Google Drive is the storage layer behind Gmail, Photos, and Docs. Anything you put in it is instantly available on every device signed into that Google account.

• 15 GB free, shared across Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos; paid Google One plans run from 100 GB up to 2 TB and beyond.
• Native Docs, Sheets, and Slides files have counted against the quota since June 2021, so an already-busy account has less free room than the headline number suggests.
• Google caps uploads at about 750 GB per account per day and 5 TB per single file — relevant if you're draining a large NAS.
• Excellent search, link sharing, and mobile apps; no filesystem semantics like symlinks or Unix permissions.

First, Mount the NFS Share on Your Computer

Every method below starts the same way: the share needs to be mounted so it looks like a local folder. This is the step people skip, and it's the reason "copy NFS to Google Drive" searches end up on pages that never mention NFS. It takes a minute.

On macOS

In Finder press ⌘K (Go → Connect to Server), enter nfs://192.168.1.50/volume1/photos — your NAS address and export path — and click Connect. The share appears under /Volumes/photos. If Finder refuses with "Operation not permitted", the export is insisting on a privileged source port; mount it from Terminal instead:

mkdir -p ~/nfs-photos
sudo mount -t nfs -o resvport,rw 192.168.1.50:/volume1/photos ~/nfs-photos

The resvport option is the usual fix for Synology and Linux exports. Alternatively, enable "Allow connections from non-privileged ports" on the NAS's NFS settings and Finder will work.

On Windows

Windows 10 and 11 Pro, Enterprise, and Education include a Client for NFS; turn it on under Settings → Optional features → More Windows features → Services for NFS. Then, in Command Prompt:

mount -o anon \\192.168.1.50\volume1\photos N:

Windows Home doesn't ship the NFS client. Almost every NAS exports the same folder over SMB as well, so on Home editions map the share as a normal network drive instead — the rest of this guide works identically, and this SMB guide covers the mapping step.

From here on, /Volumes/photos (or N:\) is just a folder as far as your browser, OurClone, and rclone are concerned.

Method 1: Drag the Mounted Folder into the Google Drive Web App

With the share mounted, the no-tools route is the same as uploading anything else: open Drive in a browser and drag folders in. Fine for a few hundred files; frustrating past that.

1. 📂 Open the share in Finder or File Explorer — Navigate to /Volumes/photos (Mac) or N:\ (Windows) and locate the folders you want in Drive.
2. ⬆️ Drop them into Drive — Sign in at drive.google.com, open the destination folder, and drag the folders from the share into the browser window. Chrome and Edge upload whole folder trees; a small progress panel at the bottom right tracks each file.

The catch: the browser reads every byte off the NAS and pushes it up in one sitting, the tab has to stay open, and there's no resume — a dropped Wi-Fi connection or a laptop lid closing means starting the folder over. Nothing tells you which files failed, either. That's why the next two methods exist.

Method 2: Copy the NFS Share to Google Drive with OurClone

OurClone reads the mounted share as a local folder and uploads straight to Google's API from your Mac or PC — no relay server, and every file's status is visible in the Task panel. Because the NFS side needs no account, it's really two steps plus a verification.

• 🗂️ Step 1: The share is already your source — Nothing to add for the NFS side. As long as the mount from the previous section is in place, OurClone's folder picker can browse into /Volumes/photos or N:\ like any other directory.
• 🔗 Step 2: Add Google Drive as the Destination (Browser Sign-In) — In OurClone open Add Storage and pick Google Drive. Give the connection a name; a browser window opens to Google's sign-in. Choose the account, click Allow, and Google Drive appears in your storage list. The free tier of OurClone allows two connected storages, which is plenty for this job.



• 🎛️ Step 3: Pick the Share, the Drive Folder, and a Mode — Open the Migrate tab. On the source side choose Local and browse to the mounted share (or a subfolder of it). On the target side choose Google Drive and select or create the destination folder. Then choose what "copy" should mean:
  • Copy — uploads everything to Google Drive and leaves the NFS share exactly as it was. This is the one you want for an off-site copy.
  • Move — uploads, then deletes the originals from the share. Use it only when you are decommissioning the NAS, and remember the NFS export must be mounted read-write for the delete to succeed.
  • Sync — makes the Drive folder mirror the share: files that exist only in the Drive folder are removed; the share itself is never touched.
  Click Migrate.



• 📈 Watch It Land, Then Spot-Check — The Task panel shows files done, current speed, ETA, and a list of anything that failed. When it reads completed, open Google Drive in OurClone or in the browser and check a couple of deep folders. If a run is interrupted, start the same Copy again — files already in Drive with matching size and modification time are skipped, so it picks up where it stopped rather than re-uploading.

Run a Copy on one subfolder first and open it in Drive. Once you trust the result, queue the rest — a multi-hundred-gigabyte share is fine to leave running overnight, and if Google's 750 GB-per-day upload cap kicks in the job simply resumes the next day with the same Copy.

Method 3: Copy NFS to Google Drive with rclone (Command Line)

OurClone is built on rclone, so on a headless Linux box that already mounts the export, or in a script, you can run the identical transfer from a shell. One thing to know up front: rclone has no NFS backend. It reads the share through the OS mount as a local path, which is why the mount step above is not optional.

Step 1: Install rclone

Grab it from the official downloads page, or brew install rclone on macOS and your distro's package manager on Linux.

Step 2: Configure the Google Drive remote

Only one remote is needed — the NFS side is a local path. Run rclone config, choose n for a new remote, name it gdrive, pick the drive backend, and accept auto-config so a browser opens for Google's OAuth consent. Leave the client ID blank unless you have your own.

Step 3: Run the transfer

The three verbs match OurClone's modes exactly:

# Copy — share untouched, only new/changed files upload on re-runs
rclone copy /Volumes/photos gdrive:NAS/photos --progress

# Move — delete from the share after each file lands in Drive
rclone move /Volumes/photos gdrive:NAS/photos --progress

# Sync — make the Drive folder mirror the share (deletes extras in Drive only)
rclone sync /Volumes/photos gdrive:NAS/photos --progress --dry-run

On Windows the source is the mapped letter: rclone copy N:\ gdrive:NAS/photos --progress. For a big Synology share a more realistic command line is:

rclone copy /Volumes/photos gdrive:NAS/photos --progress \
  --transfers 4 --drive-chunk-size 64M \
  --exclude "@eaDir/**" --exclude "#recycle/**" \
  --drive-stop-on-upload-limit

--drive-stop-on-upload-limit makes rclone stop cleanly when Google's 750 GB/day cap is reached instead of retrying for hours; run the same command again tomorrow and it continues.

Caveats

• ⚠️ move deletes from the NAS and sync deletes from Drive — run --dry-run first and read the output.
• ⚠️ Symlinks on the share are skipped with a notice unless you add --copy-links; hard-coded absolute links inside the export usually don't resolve on your machine anyway.
• ⚠️ Progress and errors live in the terminal only, and if the NFS mount drops mid-run rclone sees an empty source — with sync that is dangerous, which is another reason to prefer copy.

Which Method for Which Job?

What Goes Wrong Between a NAS Export and Google Drive