How to Access OneDrive on Linux thanks to OneDriver

OneDrive is a cloud storage service offered by Microsoft completely similar to Google Drive and DropBox, perhaps more popular. The functionalities of the Microsoft tool are in line with those of the competitors but the lack of a client for is felt Linux . For this reason I want to you about tell OneDriver , a native Linux filesystem for Microsoft OneDrive . OneDriver allows you to access files saved on OneDrive from your file manager, as if they were present in any folder on your system.

OneDriver, how it works

First of all it must be said that OneDriver is completely free and open-source , it is distributed under the GPLv3 license. It works with both basic OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, even in multi-account mode.

Using OneDriver, files are downloaded only when you try to open them. This means that those with a lot of files in their cloud don’t have to wait for them all to be downloaded before using them, and you don’t have to use selective sync. Any changes or new files created in the OneDrive folder are automatically uploaded to Microsoft OneDrive (and vice versa, synchronization is two-way). If you somehow edit a file both locally and remotely on OneDrive at the same time, the local copy will always have priority.

How to Access OneDrive on Linux thanks to OneDriver

Once downloaded, the files that have been opened are available even if the computer is no longer connected to the Internet. The filesystem becomes read-only in offline mode and automatically re-enables write access when you reconnect to the Internet.

New release

OneDriver has been available for some time but I decided to tell you about it today because it has reached a good maturity. The latest release, v0.11.0, has been available for about ten days and introduces a handy GUI that allows you to simplify some operations such as adding an account, mount / unmount an account and auto mount at startup.

Furthermore, the developers have fixed several important bugs. One of the bugs fixed led to the generation of 0 byte files when they were created with software such as LibreOffice, KeepassXC or Krita.

Additionally, the tool now uses tag tags to manage server-side change synchronization on the client, which reduces the number of times files need to be re-downloaded due to incorrect timestamps received from the Microsoft API.

Flaws? Few, but some are there:

  • It is not possible to access the OneDrive recycle bin as Microsoft does not expose the appropriate API;
  • OneDriver loads files into memory when accessed to make things faster, this works well with small files but is not very efficient when the files are very large.

Download & install

For those of you who use Fedora / CentOS / RHEL it is recommended to install onedriver via COPR :

sudo dnf copr  enable  jstaf/onedriver
sudo dnf install onedriver 

On Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and derivatives you can take advantage of this PPA :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jstaf/onedriver
sudo apt update
sudo apt install onedriver 

Arch, Manjaro and derivatives can install it from AUR .

For more details on the functionality of this tool and on the installation procedure, I refer you to the official GitHub page .

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