With the recent announcement that Ubuntu One is shutting down its services, its time to find some alternatives.

Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage. Not bad. If you need more room, Google charges only $2 per month for 100GB of storage space. If you dont mind the intrusive nature of Google, this is a cheap possibility. Unfortunately there is no native client in Ubuntu/linux for Google Drive. However...

There is a command line tool called "grive" and thanks to thefanclub a great app called grive-tools was created as a GUI for grive.

Grive-tools works great on Ubuntu 12.10 or newer and Linux Mint 14 or newer. As you can see in the screenshot above, there is a nice Google Drive indicator.

To install grive-tools, input these two commands into a terminal...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thefanclub/grive-tools
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install grive grive-tools

If you need to install it on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, its a bit tricky (I could not get it to work) using these instructions HERE.

Grive-tools for Google Drive is basic but it gets the job done. Check out our next couple of articles for more options to Ubuntu One. if you are looking for something with more features that supports Google Drive, give Insync a try. I really like it so far!