Sheetpost

WHAT

Upload & download UU-encoded data with Google Sheets.

This abomination uses uu and gspread to post single files to Google Sheets. You can encode videos, music, pictures and more in a hilariously inefficient manner that won't count towards your Google Drive storage quota. The size limit is determined by Google Sheet's hard cap of 2 million cells, which is ~99 GB of UU-encoded data at 49,500 characters (or bytes) per cell. Keep in mind UU encoding adds a ~33% data overhead to the actual file size.

Uploading takes forever, but downloading is surprisingly snappy.

WHY

Why not!

Setup

You'll need gspread and oauth2client.

pip install gspread oauth2client

gspread requires valid Drive API credentials for use in OAuth2. Here's how to do this.

On line 16 in sheetpost.py, edit the following value:

json_file = '[your file here].json'

Additionally, you'll need to spoonfeed it a Google Sheet to start off with (via key, which is found in the URL when opening the spreadsheet in a browser), and that blank sheet must be "shared" with the service account you created (so the program can write to it).

Usage

To sheetpost:

sheetpost.py put [GSheets key from URL] [Input filename]

This will delete all previously existing content in the target sheet.

To retrieve a sheetpost:

sheetpost.py get [GSheets key from URL] [Output filename]

Example:

sheetpost.py put 1cagGaHFBk5rFjJ6klMRwdVsUvTgslWtg9x8B-rz5C-I "C:\potato\potato.png"

sheetpost.py get 1cagGaHFBk5rFjJ6klMRwdVsUvTgslWtg9x8B-rz5C-I "C:\potato\reassembled_potato.png"

Note that sheetpost has no idea what format your files actually are, so you'll have to somehow remember what each sheetpost contains.

You could use a spreadsheet to keep track of that.

Quirks

• Uploading is slow. A 5MB file takes roughly ~3 minutes. Download is a lot faster though!
• It doesn't support multiple files, but you can upload a .zip or .7z archive.
• Google Sheets has a hardcoded character limit of 50,000 per cell. Sheetpost utilizes 49,500 character per cell, just to be safe. You can probably tweak this and gain some more "performance".
• Sheets interprets a cell starting with "=" as a formula. To combat this, Sheetpost prepends every single line with a single quote ('). This is stupid, but it works. The get mode consequently trims out the first single quote per cell when reassembling the file.
• If you open your Sheet in a browser after an upload, it might WILL vomit blood.