If you have a Google Workspace account and use the generous Google Drive offerings, there may be times when you need to automate uploading a lot of data and you may quickly find yourself hitting the 750GB daily upload limit.
An obvious solution to this problem is to simply calculate what you can upload that day and start the upload process. Two instant downsides are that you have to remember what time you started and finished the upload process the previous day, and that you may simply forget to start the upload process at all.
As I use rclone to sync my data to Google Drive, the solution to this is to use one of the parameters available. My preference is to use the --bwlimit 8.5M setting as it allows for 24/7 uploading.
As a personal note, I do not recommend abusing the limits – they are there for a reason. My reason for this post and explanations are that I needed to move around 10TB of data from one drive to another, and as far as I can tell, there currently isn’t any way to do this within Google Drive itself.
Bandwidth Limit
Setting a bandwidth limit allows you to purposely throttle your upload speed so that you never hit the 750GB daily upload limit.
Use the setting --bwlimit 8.5M to allow 24/7 uploading without hitting the limit.
Transfer Limit
Setting a transfer limit allows you to automatically stop the upload once the transfer limit has been reached.
Use the setting --max-transfer 740G to give you a small buffer in case you need to manually upload anything that day.
Stop at Limit
Enabling the stop at limit parameter allows rclone to monitor the error messages on uploading, and when the limit has been reached, rclone will automatically stop the upload process.
Use the setting --drive-stop-on-upload-limit to enable the limit check.