How to Know Folder Size in Google Drive using RClone

Before File Explorer came into existence, we could check the folder and file size in Windows using dos commands. What if there was a similar command for cloud-drives. MIT developers did the exact thing and developed a command line utility for cloud-storage services.

Rclone is an open source program which can be used on different cloud platforms and OS. Its main pros are you can do sync, transfer, crypt, cache, union, compress and mount folders. The supported back-end cloud solutions are more than 45+ which include Google Drive, Amazon Drive, Drop Box, Microsoft OneDrive and many others.

Rclone

It is a command line utility which can be used on Windows, Mac, Linux OS. You can connect to Google Drive and see the folder size in the CMD utility in Windows.

How to Configure Rclone in Windows to Remote Machine

• Download the Rclone utility folder.

• Unzip the folder and locate the rclone application utility path.
• It is around 42MB in size.

• Open CMD utility in Windows in administrator mode.
• change to the path of the rClone program.
• Type rclone config.
• A new remote is to be created.

• Press n, in the next options and Press Enter
• You asked to enter a name for your Google Drive. Give a name and remember it.
• Under Storage, enter drive which is the code for Google Drive. Press Enter.
• Client ID and Secret are required. Press Enter for those two values for default.
• Next, one of the 5 options are required.
• Press 2 to grant read only access to file metadata and file contents. It is the scope.

• Press Enter for root_folder_id
• For service_account_file, Press Enter again.
• For advanced config, select n which is the default.
• Again press y to select the default value for auto config.
• Then, you are asked to grant access to the Google Drive account for rClone in the default browser tab.

• Enter the account login details and 2FA if necessary.
• You should see a Success page. Otherwise, repeat the steps. You have probably done something wrong.

To see folder size google drive using an add-on you can see this article on our site.

How to see Google Drive Folder Size using RClone command

• Go back to CMD utility and enter the following command.
• For shared drive, press n which is the default value.
• For team drive, press y , the default value.

• Your remote drive name for Google drive is shown.
• Press q to quit config. Your Google Drive remote machine is linked.
• You are back at the default path of the rClone program in your command-line utility program of Windows.
• Enter the following command to know the Google Drive folder size.
• rClone size <remote name>:<folder name and path from root>
• You need to give quotes for folder names with space.
• You can also get the subfolder size and number of files. It will be listed as Total objects.

To see the other methods to check google drive folder size, you can see this internal article.

This method is free and can check google drive folder size even when the file number is greater than 200. There are other options also with this cmd line utility which you can check in its documentation.

Once you have checked it, you can delete the remote machine access.