How to use GCP bucket data on windows file system

Question

I want to access GCP bucket data on windows 10 as file system.

GCP provide FUSE for mac and Linux, Is there any way to mount GCP bucket with Windows.

Answer 1

Accordingly to the documentation Cloud Storage FUSE:

Cloud Storage FUSE is an open source FUSE adapter that allows you to mount Cloud Storage buckets as file systems on Linux or macOS systems.

As a result, there is no easy way of using it on the Windows systems.

There are a few possible ways to solve it:

1. Rclone

   Rclone is a command line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces. Over 40 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, as well as standard transfer protocols.

   • Install Rclone and WinFsp. Remember to add Rclone location to your PATH.

   • Follow the instructions to set up your remote GCP bucket. If your GCP bucket use Uniform bucket-level access, remember to set the --gcs-bucket-policy-only option to true when configuring Rclone remote drive.

   • Mount the remote GCP bucket as a local disk

     rclone mount remote:path/to/files X: 
     

     where X: is an unused drive letter.

2. GcsFuse-Win:

   GcsFuse-Win is a distributed FUSE based file system backed by Google cloud storage service. It is the first open source native version of gcs fuse on windows.It allows you to mount the buckets/folders in the storage account as a the local folder/driver on Windows system. It support the cluster mode. you can mount the blob container (or part of it) across multiple windows nodes.

3. CloudBerry Drive (proprietary software):

   Mount cloud storage as a network drive to your Windows workstation or Windows Server

4. Mount bucket with FUSE into a Linux instance and share it via network Samba/NFS.

Answer 2

Another three tools that may be usefull here are:

NetDrive - this is a paid software (~50USD per lifetime licence). You can try it out for free however (7 days trial) and it will actually allow you to mount whatever GCP storage you have as a filesystem in Windows.

Mountain Duck - has very similar abilities and also allows mounting GCP storage in Windows - it's sligtly cheaper ~40USD for one user but it's valid for a specific major version.

CyberDuck - is the free (or libre as the official page states) version of the Mountain Duck - it doesn't allow mounting resources as a filesystem but it still let you access any cloud storage via it's interface simple & intuitive).