Driven
Driven app icon: a road leading up into a cloud on a deep teal background

Driven

One-way, encrypted backup of your local folders to your own Google Drive.

A fast, battery- and network-aware desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Your source folders stay the single source of truth; Driven only ever uploads, so there are no two-way sync surprises.

Download View on GitHub

Free and open source. Dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0.

What Driven does

  • One-way to your own Drive

    Backs up to a Google Drive you control. No second cloud bill, no two-way sync surprises - local changes flow up, never back down.

  • Client-side encryption

    Optional per-source encryption (XChaCha20-Poly1305) scrambles file names and contents on your machine. A BIP39 recovery phrase guards the master key, so Google stores only ciphertext.

  • Gitignore-aware scanner

    Honors your .gitignore, built-in and custom exclude rules, and a configurable symlink policy, so you back up what matters and skip the noise.

  • Battery and network aware

    Backups defer on battery and on metered or offline networks, then resume automatically. A paced, concurrent executor retries and resumes interrupted uploads.

  • Windows Volume Shadow Copy

    VSS support backs up locked files - Outlook PSTs, running database files, VM disks - that an ordinary copy cannot read.

  • In-app restore browser

    Browse your backup with full-text file-name search and streaming decrypt, then restore exactly the files you need.

  • Activity dashboard

    A live tail plus a filterable history shows what was backed up, when, and whether anything needs attention.

  • Signed auto-update

    In-app auto-update with signed update manifests and a stable or dev channel selector keeps you current. (See the macOS note below.)

  • Opt-out telemetry

    Anonymous, opt-out telemetry records coarse counts only - never file names, paths, or content.

  • Choice of backup destination

    Back up to Google Drive, any S3-compatible object store (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2, Wasabi), or a local or removable folder - a USB drive, external disk, or NAS share - with no account needed for the last one.

  • Guided macOS Full Disk Access

    When macOS privacy protection blocks a file, Driven says so and offers a one-click jump to the right System Settings pane instead of leaving you to find it.

  • Scheduled integrity scrub

    A weekly rolling pass compares already-backed-up files against what the destination actually holds - size always, content checksum where the destination can supply one - catching remote-side corruption that a normal sync would never notice.

  • rclone config importer

    Already have an rclone.conf? driven-cli rclone reads it and tells you exactly what to enter, rather than making you re-type every endpoint and key.

Get it

Download the installer for your platform from the GitHub Releases page. Grab the latest release and pick the asset for your OS.

  • Windows

    .msi or .exe (NSIS) installer.

  • macOS

    .dmg, universal (Apple Silicon and Intel).

  • Linux

    .AppImage (portable) or .deb (Debian / Ubuntu).

Binaries are not yet code-signed with a paid OS certificate, so the OS may warn you on first run. On Windows click "More info" then "Run anyway"; on macOS right-click the app and choose "Open". The in-app auto-updater works on Windows and Linux; on macOS, re-download the latest .dmg to update until Developer ID signing lands. The macOS-specific work in this release was verified on real Apple Silicon hardware; that is a separate thing from code signing, which is still pending.

Go to Releases

Bring your own keys

Driven uses YOUR own Google OAuth client credentials and backs up to a Google Drive YOU own - not a shared, app-wide cloud account. You stay in control of your Google project, and there is no shared rate-limit or verification bottleneck.

The OAuth flow uses PKCE on a loopback redirect, so your client secret never leaves your machine, and refresh tokens are stored only in the OS keychain. With per-source encryption enabled, your files are encrypted locally before upload, so the data at rest in Drive is ciphertext only.