Problem Statement: I am working with a lot of freelancers for various small creative and content related work but they usually share the completed work as a folder in Google drive. Keep in mind that they are the owner of this folder. After 1 week or so the freelancer is no longer is tasked with us and decides to free up his drive and delete this folder.
I want to mitigate this problem. There are various ways to approach this:
1. Ask the freelancer to transfer ownership and then keep the folder safe.
2. Download and backup the shared folder whenever you receive a submission.
3. Automate the backing up process as secondary storage.
Of course, ‘automation’ wins, as not only it removes the hassle from both the concerned parties but you have a secondary backup for long-term retrieval and safekeeping as well.
Let’s get to it.
First, set up a VM on Google Cloud, you can use AWS or any other service. I used GC because they have f1.micro(0.6GB Memory, 1 shared vCPU) always free. Not using Google’s Storage because they haven’t added GUI to it, yet.
In the GCP Console, go to the VM Instances page. Launch Instance.
Follow this quickstart guide for starting the VM. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/quickstart-linux
(more…)