I Use Google Drive as My Primary File System. Here's How I Got Claude Cowork to Play Nice With It.

TL;DR: If you use Google Drive for Desktop in streaming mode, Claude Cowork can't reliably access those files. Set your working folders to "Available offline" (mirrored), grant Cowork access to those specific folders, and everything works. Details below. I'm in the middle of going cloud-first with my file storage. The goal: use Google Drive as my primary document store, stream everything to my Mac via the Google Drive for Desktop app, and only mirror the folders I'm actively working in. Less local storage used, everything accessible from anywhere. Then I started setting up Claude Cowork's file system access, and hit a question that I couldn't find a clear answer to anywhere. The Setup If you're not familiar with Google Drive for Desktop on macOS, here's the short version: it mounts your entire Google Drive as a volume in Finder. It looks and behaves like a normal folder full of normal files. You can navigate it, open files, drag things around. It feels local. But it's not. By default,