I am using version 51 of Google Drive for Desktop. It has four accounts added to it. Each account is mounted to MacOS (Mojave) as a volume. Each volume has an irritatingly long name like: [email protected] - Google Drive
. I have four of these in my Finder's Sidebar, I want to rename these, but cannot. I also these four accounts with irritatingly long name mounted on the Desktop. I would like to rename these too, but cannot.
I have tried to rename the mounted volumes:
- through the Finder's Get Info pane, but the name field is grayed out.
- via the command line with
mv
, this works, but then Google Drive Desktop cannot find the folder.
When I could not rename the Google Drive for Desktop mounted volumes, I tried to hide them ... this did not work either.
I have tried to hide the mounted volumes by:
- dragging them from the Finder's Sidebar; this only works for one account every time and the other three it never works.
- using
diskutil rename
does not work ... the mounted volumes are invisible todiskutil
and the GUI version 'Disk Utility'. SetFile -a V /GoogleDrive
gives an error: "ERROR: Unexpected Error. (-5000) on file: /Volumes/GoogleDrive".chflags hidden /Volumes/GoogleDrive
gives an error: "chflags: GoogleDrive: Input/output error".- xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo /Volumes/GoogleDrive gives an error: "xattr: GoogleDrive: No such xattr: com.apple.FinderInfo".
The mounted volumes do show in /Volumes when using ls
and the permissions are drwx------
and ownership is mrcook staff
. This is where things get dodgy.
Here is the output of ls -pal
in /Volumes
:
I may be the owner of the mounted volumes, but actually I am not. I cannot change the permissions or the ownership of any of the Google Drive for Desktop volumes. chmod
, chown
, and chgrp
do nothing. Using sudo
does nothing. Using root (sudo su
) does nothing too. Root should always work, the user should always be able to 100% control over their computer ... it feels like Google has made choices for me about how things look and behave on my computer and has absconded with control my computer.
I am looking for a solution to circumvent whatever Google has done that will let me change the volume names or hide the volumes and still let me sync files to my Google Drive folders.
I am aware of this related question:
Google drive for desktop - how can I remove the virtual drives?
Regarding the type of accounts linked to Drive for Desktop: one is a "free" account and other three are Google Workspaces accounts, all three with different entities (two Google Workspaces are the lowest business tier, the third is top tier education).
Google Drive for Desktop currently limits the number of accounts linked to a maximum of 4 simultaneous accounts.
Update 2021.10.1
As expected due to the announcement in this Google Workspaces post, Backup and Sync has stopped functioning on my work computer:
The only option is download Drive for Desktop to regain similar functions, e.g. a folder that has your Drive files but is accessible without going to a browser and using drive.google.com.
mv
suggests that you can't do it just OS level and have it working. You need to change the references on the Google side as well.