rclone/MANUAL.md

% rclone(1) User Manual % Nick Craig-Wood % Jul 22, 2017

Rclone

Rclone is a command line program to sync files and directories to and from

• Google Drive
• Amazon S3
• Openstack Swift / Rackspace cloud files / Memset Memstore
• Dropbox
• Google Cloud Storage
• Amazon Drive
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Hubic
• Backblaze B2
• Yandex Disk
• SFTP
• FTP
• HTTP
• The local filesystem

Features

• MD5/SHA1 hashes checked at all times for file integrity
• Timestamps preserved on files
• Partial syncs supported on a whole file basis
• Copy mode to just copy new/changed files
• Sync (one way) mode to make a directory identical
• Check mode to check for file hash equality
• Can sync to and from network, eg two different cloud accounts
• Optional encryption (Crypt)
• Optional FUSE mount (rclone mount)

Links

• Home page
• Github project page for source and bug tracker
• Rclone Forum
• Google+ page
• Downloads

Install

Rclone is a Go program and comes as a single binary file.

Quickstart

• Download the relevant binary.
• Unpack and the rclone binary.
• Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

See below for some expanded Linux / macOS instructions.

See the Usage section of the docs for how to use rclone, or run rclone -h.

Linux installation from precompiled binary

Fetch and unpack

curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

Copy binary file

sudo cp rclone /usr/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/rclone

Install manpage

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb 

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

rclone config

macOS installation from precompiled binary

Download the latest version of rclone.

cd && curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Unzip the download and cd to the extracted folder.

unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip && cd rclone-*-osx-amd64

Move rclone to your $PATH. You will be prompted for your password.

sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

Remove the leftover files.

cd .. && rm -rf rclone-*-osx-amd64 rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

rclone config

Install from source

Make sure you have at least Go 1.6 installed. Make sure your GOPATH is set, then:

go get -u -v github.com/ncw/rclone

and this will build the binary in $GOPATH/bin. If you have built rclone before then you will want to update its dependencies first with this

go get -u -v github.com/ncw/rclone/...

Installation with Ansible

This can be done with Stefan Weichinger's ansible role.

Instructions

1. git clone https://github.com/stefangweichinger/ansible-rclone.git into your local roles-directory
2. add the role to the hosts you want rclone installed to:

    - hosts: rclone-hosts
      roles:
          - rclone

Installation with snap

Quickstart

• install Snapd on your distro using the instructions below
• sudo snap install rclone --classic
• Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

See below for how to install snapd if it isn't already installed

Arch

sudo pacman -S snapd

enable the snapd systemd service:

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.socket

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install snapd

Fedora

sudo dnf copr enable zyga/snapcore
sudo dnf install snapd

enable the snapd systemd service:

sudo systemctl enable --now snapd.service

SELinux support is in beta, so currently:

sudo setenforce 0

to persist, edit /etc/selinux/config to set SELINUX=permissive and reboot.

Gentoo

Install the gentoo-snappy overlay.

OpenEmbedded/Yocto

Install the snap meta layer.

openSUSE

sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/system:/snappy/openSUSE_Leap_42.2/ snappy
sudo zypper install snapd

OpenWrt

Enable the snap-openwrt feed.

Configure

First, you'll need to configure rclone. As the object storage systems have quite complicated authentication these are kept in a config file. (See the --config entry for how to find the config file and choose its location.)

The easiest way to make the config is to run rclone with the config option:

rclone config

See the following for detailed instructions for

• Google Drive
• Amazon S3
• Swift / Rackspace Cloudfiles / Memset Memstore
• Dropbox
• Google Cloud Storage
• Local filesystem
• Amazon Drive
• Backblaze B2
• Hubic
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Yandex Disk
• SFTP
• FTP
• HTTP
• Crypt - to encrypt other remotes

Usage

Rclone syncs a directory tree from one storage system to another.

Its syntax is like this

Syntax: [options] subcommand <parameters> <parameters...>

Source and destination paths are specified by the name you gave the storage system in the config file then the sub path, eg "drive:myfolder" to look at "myfolder" in Google drive.

You can define as many storage paths as you like in the config file.

Subcommands

rclone uses a system of subcommands. For example

rclone ls remote:path # lists a re
rclone copy /local/path remote:path # copies /local/path to the remote
rclone sync /local/path remote:path # syncs /local/path to the remote

rclone config

Enter an interactive configuration session.

Synopsis

Enter an interactive configuration session.

rclone config

rclone copy

Copy files from source to dest, skipping already copied

Synopsis

Copy the source to the destination. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Doesn't delete files from the destination.

Note that it is always the contents of the directory that is synced, not the directory so when source:path is a directory, it's the contents of source:path that are copied, not the directory name and contents.

If dest:path doesn't exist, it is created and the source:path contents go there.

For example

rclone copy source:sourcepath dest:destpath

Let's say there are two files in sourcepath

sourcepath/one.txt
sourcepath/two.txt

This copies them to

destpath/one.txt
destpath/two.txt

Not to

destpath/sourcepath/one.txt
destpath/sourcepath/two.txt

If you are familiar with rsync, rclone always works as if you had written a trailing / - meaning "copy the contents of this directory". This applies to all commands and whether you are talking about the source or destination.

See the --no-traverse option for controlling whether rclone lists the destination directory or not.

rclone copy source:path dest:path

rclone sync

Make source and dest identical, modifying destination only.

Synopsis

Sync the source to the destination, changing the destination only. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Destination is updated to match source, including deleting files if necessary.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run flag to see exactly what would be copied and deleted.

Note that files in the destination won't be deleted if there were any errors at any point.

It is always the contents of the directory that is synced, not the directory so when source:path is a directory, it's the contents of source:path that are copied, not the directory name and contents. See extended explanation in the copy command above if unsure.

If dest:path doesn't exist, it is created and the source:path contents go there.

rclone sync source:path dest:path

rclone move

Move files from source to dest.

Synopsis

Moves the contents of the source directory to the destination directory. Rclone will error if the source and destination overlap and the remote does not support a server side directory move operation.

If no filters are in use and if possible this will server side move source:path into dest:path. After this source:path will no longer longer exist.

Otherwise for each file in source:path selected by the filters (if any) this will move it into dest:path. If possible a server side move will be used, otherwise it will copy it (server side if possible) into dest:path then delete the original (if no errors on copy) in source:path.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run flag.

rclone move source:path dest:path

rclone delete

Remove the contents of path.

Synopsis

Remove the contents of path. Unlike purge it obeys include/exclude filters so can be used to selectively delete files.

Eg delete all files bigger than 100MBytes

Check what would be deleted first (use either)

rclone --min-size 100M lsl remote:path
rclone --dry-run --min-size 100M delete remote:path

Then delete

rclone --min-size 100M delete remote:path

That reads "delete everything with a minimum size of 100 MB", hence delete all files bigger than 100MBytes.

rclone delete remote:path

rclone purge

Remove the path and all of its contents.

Synopsis

Remove the path and all of its contents. Note that this does not obey include/exclude filters - everything will be removed. Use delete if you want to selectively delete files.

rclone purge remote:path

rclone mkdir

Make the path if it doesn't already exist.

Synopsis

Make the path if it doesn't already exist.

rclone mkdir remote:path

rclone rmdir

Remove the path if empty.

Synopsis

Remove the path. Note that you can't remove a path with objects in it, use purge for that.

rclone rmdir remote:path

rclone check

Checks the files in the source and destination match.

Synopsis

Checks the files in the source and destination match. It compares sizes and hashes (MD5 or SHA1) and logs a report of files which don't match. It doesn't alter the source or destination.

If you supply the --size-only flag, it will only compare the sizes not the hashes as well. Use this for a quick check.

If you supply the --download flag, it will download the data from both remotes and check them against each other on the fly. This can be useful for remotes that don't support hashes or if you really want to check all the data.

rclone check source:path dest:path [flags]

Options

      --download   Check by downloading rather than with hash.

rclone ls

List all the objects in the path with size and path.

Synopsis

List all the objects in the path with size and path.

rclone ls remote:path

rclone lsd

List all directories/containers/buckets in the path.

Synopsis

List all directories/containers/buckets in the path.

rclone lsd remote:path

rclone lsl

List all the objects path with modification time, size and path.

Synopsis

List all the objects path with modification time, size and path.

rclone lsl remote:path

rclone md5sum

Produces an md5sum file for all the objects in the path.

Synopsis

Produces an md5sum file for all the objects in the path. This is in the same format as the standard md5sum tool produces.

rclone md5sum remote:path

rclone sha1sum

Produces an sha1sum file for all the objects in the path.

Synopsis

Produces an sha1sum file for all the objects in the path. This is in the same format as the standard sha1sum tool produces.

rclone sha1sum remote:path

rclone size

Prints the total size and number of objects in remote:path.

Synopsis

Prints the total size and number of objects in remote:path.

rclone size remote:path

rclone version

Show the version number.

Synopsis

Show the version number.

rclone version

rclone cleanup

Clean up the remote if possible

Synopsis

Clean up the remote if possible. Empty the trash or delete old file versions. Not supported by all remotes.

rclone cleanup remote:path

rclone dedupe

Interactively find duplicate files delete/rename them.

Synopsis

By default dedup interactively finds duplicate files and offers to delete all but one or rename them to be different. Only useful with Google Drive which can have duplicate file names.

The dedupe command will delete all but one of any identical (same md5sum) files it finds without confirmation. This means that for most duplicated files the dedupe command will not be interactive. You can use --dry-run to see what would happen without doing anything.

Here is an example run.

Before - with duplicates

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:11.775000000 one.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:23:06.731000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:18:26.092000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000 two.txt
  1744073 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000 two.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000 two.txt

Now the dedupe session

$ rclone dedupe drive:dupes
2016/03/05 16:24:37 Google drive root 'dupes': Looking for duplicates using interactive mode.
one.txt: Found 4 duplicates - deleting identical copies
one.txt: Deleting 2/3 identical duplicates (md5sum "1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36")
one.txt: 2 duplicates remain
  1:      6048320 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000, md5sum 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
  2:       564374 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:23:06.731000000, md5sum 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
s) Skip and do nothing
k) Keep just one (choose which in next step)
r) Rename all to be different (by changing file.jpg to file-1.jpg)
s/k/r> k
Enter the number of the file to keep> 1
one.txt: Deleted 1 extra copies
two.txt: Found 3 duplicates - deleting identical copies
two.txt: 3 duplicates remain
  1:       564374 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000, md5sum 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
  2:      6048320 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000, md5sum 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
  3:      1744073 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000, md5sum 851957f7fb6f0bc4ce76be966d336802
s) Skip and do nothing
k) Keep just one (choose which in next step)
r) Rename all to be different (by changing file.jpg to file-1.jpg)
s/k/r> r
two-1.txt: renamed from: two.txt
two-2.txt: renamed from: two.txt
two-3.txt: renamed from: two.txt

The result being

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000 one.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000 two-1.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000 two-2.txt
  1744073 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000 two-3.txt

Dedupe can be run non interactively using the --dedupe-mode flag or by using an extra parameter with the same value

• --dedupe-mode interactive - interactive as above.
• --dedupe-mode skip - removes identical files then skips anything left.
• --dedupe-mode first - removes identical files then keeps the first one.
• --dedupe-mode newest - removes identical files then keeps the newest one.
• --dedupe-mode oldest - removes identical files then keeps the oldest one.
• --dedupe-mode rename - removes identical files then renames the rest to be different.

For example to rename all the identically named photos in your Google Photos directory, do

rclone dedupe --dedupe-mode rename "drive:Google Photos"

Or

rclone dedupe rename "drive:Google Photos"

rclone dedupe [mode] remote:path [flags]

Options

      --dedupe-mode string   Dedupe mode interactive|skip|first|newest|oldest|rename. (default "interactive")

rclone authorize

Remote authorization.

Synopsis

Remote authorization. Used to authorize a remote or headless rclone from a machine with a browser - use as instructed by rclone config.

rclone authorize

rclone cat

Concatenates any files and sends them to stdout.

Synopsis

rclone cat sends any files to standard output.

You can use it like this to output a single file

rclone cat remote:path/to/file

Or like this to output any file in dir or subdirectories.

rclone cat remote:path/to/dir

Or like this to output any .txt files in dir or subdirectories.

rclone --include "*.txt" cat remote:path/to/dir

Use the --head flag to print characters only at the start, --tail for the end and --offset and --count to print a section in the middle. Note that if offset is negative it will count from the end, so --offset -1 --count 1 is equivalent to --tail 1.

rclone cat remote:path [flags]

Options

      --count int    Only print N characters. (default -1)
      --discard      Discard the output instead of printing.
      --head int     Only print the first N characters.
      --offset int   Start printing at offset N (or from end if -ve).
      --tail int     Only print the last N characters.

rclone copyto

Copy files from source to dest, skipping already copied

Synopsis

If source:path is a file or directory then it copies it to a file or directory named dest:path.

This can be used to upload single files to other than their current name. If the source is a directory then it acts exactly like the copy command.

So

rclone copyto src dst

where src and dst are rclone paths, either remote:path or /path/to/local or C:\windows\path\if\on\windows.

This will:

if src is file
    copy it to dst, overwriting an existing file if it exists
if src is directory
    copy it to dst, overwriting existing files if they exist
    see copy command for full details

This doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. It doesn't delete files from the destination.

rclone copyto source:path dest:path

rclone cryptcheck

Cryptcheck checks the integrity of a crypted remote.

Synopsis

rclone cryptcheck checks a remote against a crypted remote. This is the equivalent of running rclone check, but able to check the checksums of the crypted remote.

For it to work the underlying remote of the cryptedremote must support some kind of checksum.

It works by reading the nonce from each file on the cryptedremote: and using that to encrypt each file on the remote:. It then checks the checksum of the underlying file on the cryptedremote: against the checksum of the file it has just encrypted.

Use it like this

rclone cryptcheck /path/to/files encryptedremote:path

You can use it like this also, but that will involve downloading all the files in remote:path.

rclone cryptcheck remote:path encryptedremote:path

After it has run it will log the status of the encryptedremote:.

rclone cryptcheck remote:path cryptedremote:path

rclone dbhashsum

Produces a Dropbbox hash file for all the objects in the path.

Synopsis

Produces a Dropbox hash file for all the objects in the path. The hashes are calculated according to Dropbox content hash rules. The output is in the same format as md5sum and sha1sum.

rclone dbhashsum remote:path

rclone genautocomplete

Output bash completion script for rclone.

Synopsis

Generates a bash shell autocompletion script for rclone.

This writes to /etc/bash_completion.d/rclone by default so will probably need to be run with sudo or as root, eg

sudo rclone genautocomplete

Logout and login again to use the autocompletion scripts, or source them directly

. /etc/bash_completion

If you supply a command line argument the script will be written there.

rclone genautocomplete [output_file]

rclone gendocs

Output markdown docs for rclone to the directory supplied.

Synopsis

This produces markdown docs for the rclone commands to the directory supplied. These are in a format suitable for hugo to render into the rclone.org website.

rclone gendocs output_directory [flags]

Options

  -h, --help   help for gendocs

rclone listremotes

List all the remotes in the config file.

Synopsis

rclone listremotes lists all the available remotes from the config file.

When uses with the -l flag it lists the types too.

rclone listremotes [flags]

Options

  -l, --long   Show the type as well as names.

rclone lsjson

List directories and objects in the path in JSON format.

Synopsis

List directories and objects in the path in JSON format.

The output is an array of Items, where each Item looks like this

{ "Hashes" : { "SHA-1" : "f572d396fae9206628714fb2ce00f72e94f2258f", "MD5" : "b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184", "DropboxHash" : "ecb65bb98f9d905b70458986c39fcbad7715e5f2fcc3b1f07767d7c83e2438cc" }, "IsDir" : false, "ModTime" : "2017-05-31T16:15:57.034468261+01:00", "Name" : "file.txt", "Path" : "full/path/goes/here/file.txt", "Size" : 6 }

If --hash is not specified the the Hashes property won't be emitted.

If --no-modtime is specified then ModTime will be blank.

The time is in RFC3339 format with nanosecond precision.

The whole output can be processed as a JSON blob, or alternatively it can be processed line by line as each item is written one to a line.

rclone lsjson remote:path [flags]

Options

      --hash         Include hashes in the output (may take longer).
      --no-modtime   Don't read the modification time (can speed things up).
  -R, --recursive    Recurse into the listing.

rclone mount

Mount the remote as a mountpoint. EXPERIMENTAL

Synopsis

rclone mount allows Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows to mount any of Rclone's cloud storage systems as a file system with FUSE.

This is EXPERIMENTAL - use with care.

First set up your remote using rclone config. Check it works with rclone ls etc.

Start the mount like this

rclone mount remote:path/to/files /path/to/local/mount

Or on Windows like this where X: is an unused drive letter

rclone mount remote:path/to/files X:

When the program ends, either via Ctrl+C or receiving a SIGINT or SIGTERM signal, the mount is automatically stopped.

The umount operation can fail, for example when the mountpoint is busy. When that happens, it is the user's responsibility to stop the mount manually with

# Linux
fusermount -u /path/to/local/mount
# OS X
umount /path/to/local/mount

Limitations

This can only write files seqentially, it can only seek when reading. This means that many applications won't work with their files on an rclone mount.

The bucket based remotes (eg Swift, S3, Google Compute Storage, B2, Hubic) won't work from the root - you will need to specify a bucket, or a path within the bucket. So swift: won't work whereas swift:bucket will as will swift:bucket/path. None of these support the concept of directories, so empty directories will have a tendency to disappear once they fall out of the directory cache.

Only supported on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows at the moment.

rclone mount vs rclone sync/copy

File systems expect things to be 100% reliable, whereas cloud storage systems are a long way from 100% reliable. The rclone sync/copy commands cope with this with lots of retries. However rclone mount can't use retries in the same way without making local copies of the uploads. This might happen in the future, but for the moment rclone mount won't do that, so will be less reliable than the rclone command.

Filters

Note that all the rclone filters can be used to select a subset of the files to be visible in the mount.

Directory Cache

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can set how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made locally in the mount may appear immediately or invalidate the cache. However, changes done on the remote will only be picked up once the cache expires.

Alternatively, you can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

Bugs

• All the remotes should work for read, but some may not for write
  • those which need to know the size in advance won't - eg B2
  • maybe should pass in size as -1 to mean work it out
  • Or put in an an upload cache to cache the files on disk first

rclone mount remote:path /path/to/mountpoint [flags]

Options

      --allow-non-empty           Allow mounting over a non-empty directory.
      --allow-other               Allow access to other users.
      --allow-root                Allow access to root user.
      --debug-fuse                Debug the FUSE internals - needs -v.
      --default-permissions       Makes kernel enforce access control based on the file mode.
      --dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for. (default 5m0s)
      --fuse-flag stringArray     Flags or arguments to be passed direct to libfuse/WinFsp. Repeat if required.
      --gid uint32                Override the gid field set by the filesystem. (default 502)
      --max-read-ahead int        The number of bytes that can be prefetched for sequential reads. (default 128k)
      --no-checksum               Don't compare checksums on up/download.
      --no-modtime                Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
      --no-seek                   Don't allow seeking in files.
  -o, --option stringArray        Option for libfuse/WinFsp. Repeat if required.
      --poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable. (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                 Mount read-only.
      --uid uint32                Override the uid field set by the filesystem. (default 502)
      --umask int                 Override the permission bits set by the filesystem.
      --write-back-cache          Makes kernel buffer writes before sending them to rclone. Without this, writethrough caching is used.

rclone moveto

Move file or directory from source to dest.

Synopsis

If source:path is a file or directory then it moves it to a file or directory named dest:path.

This can be used to rename files or upload single files to other than their existing name. If the source is a directory then it acts exacty like the move command.

So

rclone moveto src dst

where src and dst are rclone paths, either remote:path or /path/to/local or C:\windows\path\if\on\windows.

This will:

if src is file
    move it to dst, overwriting an existing file if it exists
if src is directory
    move it to dst, overwriting existing files if they exist
    see move command for full details

This doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. src will be deleted on successful transfer.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run flag.

rclone moveto source:path dest:path

rclone ncdu

Explore a remote with a text based user interface.

Synopsis

This displays a text based user interface allowing the navigation of a remote. It is most useful for answering the question - "What is using all my disk space?".

To make the user interface it first scans the entire remote given and builds an in memory representation. rclone ncdu can be used during this scanning phase and you will see it building up the directory structure as it goes along.

Here are the keys - press '?' to toggle the help on and off

 ↑,↓ or k,j to Move
 →,l to enter
 ←,h to return
 c toggle counts
 g toggle graph
 n,s,C sort by name,size,count
 ? to toggle help on and off
 q/ESC/c-C to quit

This an homage to the ncdu tool but for rclone remotes. It is missing lots of features at the moment, most importantly deleting files, but is useful as it stands.

rclone ncdu remote:path

rclone obscure

Obscure password for use in the rclone.conf

Synopsis

Obscure password for use in the rclone.conf

rclone obscure password

rclone rmdirs

Remove empty directories under the path.

Synopsis

This removes any empty directories (or directories that only contain empty directories) under the path that it finds, including the path if it has nothing in.

This is useful for tidying up remotes that rclone has left a lot of empty directories in.

rclone rmdirs remote:path

Copying single files

rclone normally syncs or copies directories. However, if the source remote points to a file, rclone will just copy that file. The destination remote must point to a directory - rclone will give the error Failed to create file system for "remote:file": is a file not a directory if it isn't.

For example, suppose you have a remote with a file in called test.jpg, then you could copy just that file like this

rclone copy remote:test.jpg /tmp/download

The file test.jpg will be placed inside /tmp/download.

This is equivalent to specifying

rclone copy --no-traverse --files-from /tmp/files remote: /tmp/download

Where /tmp/files contains the single line

test.jpg

It is recommended to use copy when copying individual files, not sync. They have pretty much the same effect but copy will use a lot less memory.

Quoting and the shell

When you are typing commands to your computer you are using something called the command line shell. This interprets various characters in an OS specific way.

Here are some gotchas which may help users unfamiliar with the shell rules

Linux / OSX

If your names have spaces or shell metacharacters (eg *, ?, $, ', " etc) then you must quote them. Use single quotes ' by default.

rclone copy 'Important files?' remote:backup

If you want to send a ' you will need to use ", eg

rclone copy "O'Reilly Reviews" remote:backup

The rules for quoting metacharacters are complicated and if you want the full details you'll have to consult the manual page for your shell.

Windows

If your names have spaces in you need to put them in ", eg

rclone copy "E:\folder name\folder name\folder name" remote:backup

If you are using the root directory on its own then don't quote it (see #464 for why), eg

rclone copy E:\ remote:backup

Copying files or directories with : in the names

rclone uses : to mark a remote name. This is, however, a valid filename component in non-Windows OSes. The remote name parser will only search for a : up to the first / so if you need to act on a file or directory like this then use the full path starting with a /, or use ./ as a current directory prefix.

So to sync a directory called sync:me to a remote called remote: use

rclone sync ./sync:me remote:path

or

rclone sync /full/path/to/sync:me remote:path

Server Side Copy

Most remotes (but not all - see the overview) support server side copy.

This means if you want to copy one folder to another then rclone won't download all the files and re-upload them; it will instruct the server to copy them in place.

Eg

rclone copy s3:oldbucket s3:newbucket

Will copy the contents of oldbucket to newbucket without downloading and re-uploading.

Remotes which don't support server side copy will download and re-upload in this case.

Server side copies are used with sync and copy and will be identified in the log when using the -v flag. The move command may also use them if remote doesn't support server side move directly. This is done by issuing a server side copy then a delete which is much quicker than a download and re-upload.

Server side copies will only be attempted if the remote names are the same.

This can be used when scripting to make aged backups efficiently, eg

rclone sync remote:current-backup remote:previous-backup
rclone sync /path/to/files remote:current-backup

Options

Rclone has a number of options to control its behaviour.

Options which use TIME use the go time parser. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".

Options which use SIZE use kByte by default. However, a suffix of b for bytes, k for kBytes, M for MBytes and G for GBytes may be used. These are the binary units, eg 1, 2**10, 2**20, 2**30 respectively.

--backup-dir=DIR

When using sync, copy or move any files which would have been overwritten or deleted are moved in their original hierarchy into this directory.

If --suffix is set, then the moved files will have the suffix added to them. If there is a file with the same path (after the suffix has been added) in DIR, then it will be overwritten.

The remote in use must support server side move or copy and you must use the same remote as the destination of the sync. The backup directory must not overlap the destination directory.

For example

rclone sync /path/to/local remote:current --backup-dir remote:old

will sync /path/to/local to remote:current, but for any files which would have been updated or deleted will be stored in remote:old.

If running rclone from a script you might want to use today's date as the directory name passed to --backup-dir to store the old files, or you might want to pass --suffix with today's date.

--bwlimit=BANDWIDTH_SPEC

This option controls the bandwidth limit. Limits can be specified in two ways: As a single limit, or as a timetable.

Single limits last for the duration of the session. To use a single limit, specify the desired bandwidth in kBytes/s, or use a suffix b|k|M|G. The default is 0 which means to not limit bandwidth.

For example, to limit bandwidth usage to 10 MBytes/s use --bwlimit 10M

It is also possible to specify a "timetable" of limits, which will cause certain limits to be applied at certain times. To specify a timetable, format your entries as "HH:MM,BANDWIDTH HH:MM,BANDWIDTH...".

An example of a typical timetable to avoid link saturation during daytime working hours could be:

--bwlimit "08:00,512 12:00,10M 13:00,512 18:00,30M 23:00,off"

In this example, the transfer bandwidth will be set to 512kBytes/sec at 8am. At noon, it will raise to 10Mbytes/s, and drop back to 512kBytes/sec at 1pm. At 6pm, the bandwidth limit will be set to 30MBytes/s, and at 11pm it will be completely disabled (full speed). Anything between 11pm and 8am will remain unlimited.

Bandwidth limits only apply to the data transfer. They don't apply to the bandwidth of the directory listings etc.

Note that the units are Bytes/s, not Bits/s. Typically connections are measured in Bits/s - to convert divide by 8. For example, let's say you have a 10 Mbit/s connection and you wish rclone to use half of it

• 5 Mbit/s. This is 5/8 = 0.625MByte/s so you would use a --bwlimit 0.625M parameter for rclone.

On Unix systems (Linux, MacOS, …) the bandwidth limiter can be toggled by sending a SIGUSR2 signal to rclone. This allows to remove the limitations of a long running rclone transfer and to restore it back to the value specified with --bwlimit quickly when needed. Assuming there is only one rclone instance running, you can toggle the limiter like this:

kill -SIGUSR2 $(pidof rclone)

--buffer-size=SIZE

Use this sized buffer to speed up file transfers. Each --transfer will use this much memory for buffering.

Set to 0 to disable the buffering for the minimum memory usage.

--checkers=N

The number of checkers to run in parallel. Checkers do the equality checking of files during a sync. For some storage systems (eg S3, Swift, Dropbox) this can take a significant amount of time so they are run in parallel.

The default is to run 8 checkers in parallel.

-c, --checksum

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check the file hash and size to determine if files are equal.

This is useful when the remote doesn't support setting modified time and a more accurate sync is desired than just checking the file size.

This is very useful when transferring between remotes which store the same hash type on the object, eg Drive and Swift. For details of which remotes support which hash type see the table in the overview section.

Eg rclone --checksum sync s3:/bucket swift:/bucket would run much quicker than without the --checksum flag.

When using this flag, rclone won't update mtimes of remote files if they are incorrect as it would normally.

--config=CONFIG_FILE

Specify the location of the rclone config file.

Normally the config file is in your home directory as a file called .config/rclone/rclone.conf (or .rclone.conf if created with an older version). If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set it will be at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rclone/rclone.conf

If you run rclone -h and look at the help for the --config option you will see where the default location is for you.

Use this flag to override the config location, eg rclone --config=".myconfig" .config.

--contimeout=TIME

Set the connection timeout. This should be in go time format which looks like 5s for 5 seconds, 10m for 10 minutes, or 3h30m.

The connection timeout is the amount of time rclone will wait for a connection to go through to a remote object storage system. It is 1m by default.

--dedupe-mode MODE

Mode to run dedupe command in. One of interactive, skip, first, newest, oldest, rename. The default is interactive. See the dedupe command for more information as to what these options mean.

-n, --dry-run

Do a trial run with no permanent changes. Use this to see what rclone would do without actually doing it. Useful when setting up the sync command which deletes files in the destination.

--ignore-checksum

Normally rclone will check that the checksums of transferred files match, and give an error "corrupted on transfer" if they don't.

You can use this option to skip that check. You should only use it if you have had the "corrupted on transfer" error message and you are sure you might want to transfer potentially corrupted data.

--ignore-existing

Using this option will make rclone unconditionally skip all files that exist on the destination, no matter the content of these files.

While this isn't a generally recommended option, it can be useful in cases where your files change due to encryption. However, it cannot correct partial transfers in case a transfer was interrupted.

--ignore-size

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check only the modification time. If --checksum is set then it only checks the checksum.

It will also cause rclone to skip verifying the sizes are the same after transfer.

This can be useful for transferring files to and from OneDrive which occasionally misreports the size of image files (see #399 for more info).

-I, --ignore-times

Using this option will cause rclone to unconditionally upload all files regardless of the state of files on the destination.

Normally rclone would skip any files that have the same modification time and are the same size (or have the same checksum if using --checksum).

--log-file=FILE

Log all of rclone's output to FILE. This is not active by default. This can be useful for tracking down problems with syncs in combination with the -v flag. See the Logging section for more info.

--log-level LEVEL

This sets the log level for rclone. The default log level is INFO.

DEBUG is equivalent to -vv. It outputs lots of debug info - useful for bug reports and really finding out what rclone is doing.

INFO is equivalent to -v. It outputs information about each transfer and prints stats once a minute by default.

NOTICE is the default log level if no logging flags are supplied. It outputs very little when things are working normally. It outputs warnings and significant events.

ERROR is equivalent to -q. It only outputs error messages.

--low-level-retries NUMBER

This controls the number of low level retries rclone does.

A low level retry is used to retry a failing operation - typically one HTTP request. This might be uploading a chunk of a big file for example. You will see low level retries in the log with the -v flag.

This shouldn't need to be changed from the default in normal operations. However, if you get a lot of low level retries you may wish to reduce the value so rclone moves on to a high level retry (see the --retries flag) quicker.

Disable low level retries with --low-level-retries 1.

--max-depth=N

This modifies the recursion depth for all the commands except purge.

So if you do rclone --max-depth 1 ls remote:path you will see only the files in the top level directory. Using --max-depth 2 means you will see all the files in first two directory levels and so on.

For historical reasons the lsd command defaults to using a --max-depth of 1 - you can override this with the command line flag.

You can use this command to disable recursion (with --max-depth 1).

Note that if you use this with sync and --delete-excluded the files not recursed through are considered excluded and will be deleted on the destination. Test first with --dry-run if you are not sure what will happen.

--modify-window=TIME

When checking whether a file has been modified, this is the maximum allowed time difference that a file can have and still be considered equivalent.

The default is 1ns unless this is overridden by a remote. For example OS X only stores modification times to the nearest second so if you are reading and writing to an OS X filing system this will be 1s by default.

This command line flag allows you to override that computed default.

--no-gzip-encoding

Don't set Accept-Encoding: gzip. This means that rclone won't ask the server for compressed files automatically. Useful if you've set the server to return files with Content-Encoding: gzip but you uploaded compressed files.

There is no need to set this in normal operation, and doing so will decrease the network transfer efficiency of rclone.

--no-update-modtime

When using this flag, rclone won't update modification times of remote files if they are incorrect as it would normally.

This can be used if the remote is being synced with another tool also (eg the Google Drive client).

-q, --quiet

Normally rclone outputs stats and a completion message. If you set this flag it will make as little output as possible.

--retries int

Retry the entire sync if it fails this many times it fails (default 3).

Some remotes can be unreliable and a few retries help pick up the files which didn't get transferred because of errors.

Disable retries with --retries 1.

--size-only

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check only the size.

This can be useful transferring files from Dropbox which have been modified by the desktop sync client which doesn't set checksums of modification times in the same way as rclone.

--stats=TIME

Commands which transfer data (sync, copy, copyto, move, moveto) will print data transfer stats at regular intervals to show their progress.

This sets the interval.

The default is 1m. Use 0 to disable.

If you set the stats interval then all commands can show stats. This can be useful when running other commands, check or mount for example.

Stats are logged at INFO level by default which means they won't show at default log level NOTICE. Use --stats-log-level NOTICE or -v to make them show. See the Logging section for more info on log levels.

--stats-log-level string

Log level to show --stats output at. This can be DEBUG, INFO, NOTICE, or ERROR. The default is INFO. This means at the default level of logging which is NOTICE the stats won't show - if you want them to then use -stats-log-level NOTICE. See the Logging section for more info on log levels.

--stats-unit=bits|bytes

By default, data transfer rates will be printed in bytes/second.

This option allows the data rate to be printed in bits/second.

Data transfer volume will still be reported in bytes.

The rate is reported as a binary unit, not SI unit. So 1 Mbit/s equals 1,048,576 bits/s and not 1,000,000 bits/s.

The default is bytes.

--suffix=SUFFIX

This is for use with --backup-dir only. If this isn't set then --backup-dir will move files with their original name. If it is set then the files will have SUFFIX added on to them.

See --backup-dir for more info.

--syslog

On capable OSes (not Windows or Plan9) send all log output to syslog.

This can be useful for running rclone in a script or rclone mount.

--syslog-facility string

If using --syslog this sets the syslog facility (eg KERN, USER). See man syslog for a list of possible facilities. The default facility is DAEMON.

--tpslimit float

Limit HTTP transactions per second to this. Default is 0 which is used to mean unlimited transactions per second.

For example to limit rclone to 10 HTTP transactions per second use --tpslimit 10, or to 1 transaction every 2 seconds use --tpslimit 0.5.

Use this when the number of transactions per second from rclone is causing a problem with the cloud storage provider (eg getting you banned or rate limited).

This can be very useful for rclone mount to control the behaviour of applications using it.

See also --tpslimit-burst.

--tpslimit-burst int

Max burst of transactions for --tpslimit. (default 1)

Normally --tpslimit will do exactly the number of transaction per second specified. However if you supply --tps-burst then rclone can save up some transactions from when it was idle giving a burst of up to the parameter supplied.

For example if you provide --tpslimit-burst 10 then if rclone has been idle for more than 10*--tpslimit then it can do 10 transactions very quickly before they are limited again.

This may be used to increase performance of --tpslimit without changing the long term average number of transactions per second.

--track-renames

By default, rclone doesn't keep track of renamed files, so if you rename a file locally then sync it to a remote, rclone will delete the old file on the remote and upload a new copy.

If you use this flag, and the remote supports server side copy or server side move, and the source and destination have a compatible hash, then this will track renames during sync, copy, and move operations and perform renaming server-side.

Files will be matched by size and hash - if both match then a rename will be considered.

If the destination does not support server-side copy or move, rclone will fall back to the default behaviour and log an error level message to the console.

Note that --track-renames is incompatible with --no-traverse and that it uses extra memory to keep track of all the rename candidates.

Note also that --track-renames is incompatible with --delete-before and will select --delete-after instead of --delete-during.

--delete-(before,during,after)

This option allows you to specify when files on your destination are deleted when you sync folders.

Specifying the value --delete-before will delete all files present on the destination, but not on the source before starting the transfer of any new or updated files. This uses two passes through the file systems, one for the deletions and one for the copies.

Specifying --delete-during will delete files while checking and uploading files. This is the fastest option and uses the least memory.

Specifying --delete-after (the default value) will delay deletion of files until all new/updated files have been successfully transferred. The files to be deleted are collected in the copy pass then deleted after the copy pass has completed successfully. The files to be deleted are held in memory so this mode may use more memory. This is the safest mode as it will only delete files if there have been no errors subsequent to that. If there have been errors before the deletions start then you will get the message not deleting files as there were IO errors.

--fast-list

When doing anything which involves a directory listing (eg sync, copy, ls - in fact nearly every command), rclone normally lists a directory and processes it before using more directory lists to process any subdirectories. This can be parallelised and works very quickly using the least amount of memory.

However, some remotes have a way of listing all files beneath a directory in one (or a small number) of transactions. These tend to be the bucket based remotes (eg S3, B2, GCS, Swift, Hubic).

If you use the --fast-list flag then rclone will use this method for listing directories. This will have the following consequences for the listing:

• It will use fewer transactions (important if you pay for them)
• It will use more memory. Rclone has to load the whole listing into memory.
• It may be faster because it uses fewer transactions
• It may be slower because it can't be parallelized

rclone should always give identical results with and without --fast-list.

If you pay for transactions and can fit your entire sync listing into memory then --fast-list is recommended. If you have a very big sync to do then don't use --fast-list otherwise you will run out of memory.

If you use --fast-list on a remote which doesn't support it, then rclone will just ignore it.

--timeout=TIME

This sets the IO idle timeout. If a transfer has started but then becomes idle for this long it is considered broken and disconnected.

The default is 5m. Set to 0 to disable.

--transfers=N

The number of file transfers to run in parallel. It can sometimes be useful to set this to a smaller number if the remote is giving a lot of timeouts or bigger if you have lots of bandwidth and a fast remote.

The default is to run 4 file transfers in parallel.

-u, --update

This forces rclone to skip any files which exist on the destination and have a modified time that is newer than the source file.

If an existing destination file has a modification time equal (within the computed modify window precision) to the source file's, it will be updated if the sizes are different.

On remotes which don't support mod time directly the time checked will be the uploaded time. This means that if uploading to one of these remotes, rclone will skip any files which exist on the destination and have an uploaded time that is newer than the modification time of the source file.

This can be useful when transferring to a remote which doesn't support mod times directly as it is more accurate than a --size-only check and faster than using --checksum.

-v, -vv, --verbose

With -v rclone will tell you about each file that is transferred and a small number of significant events.

With -vv rclone will become very verbose telling you about every file it considers and transfers. Please send bug reports with a log with this setting.

-V, --version

Prints the version number

Configuration Encryption

Your configuration file contains information for logging in to your cloud services. This means that you should keep your .rclone.conf file in a secure location.

If you are in an environment where that isn't possible, you can add a password to your configuration. This means that you will have to enter the password every time you start rclone.

To add a password to your rclone configuration, execute rclone config.

>rclone config
Current remotes:

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/s/q>

Go into s, Set configuration password:

e/n/d/s/q> s
Your configuration is not encrypted.
If you add a password, you will protect your login information to cloud services.
a) Add Password
q) Quit to main menu
a/q> a
Enter NEW configuration password:
password:
Confirm NEW password:
password:
Password set
Your configuration is encrypted.
c) Change Password
u) Unencrypt configuration
q) Quit to main menu
c/u/q>

Your configuration is now encrypted, and every time you start rclone you will now be asked for the password. In the same menu, you can change the password or completely remove encryption from your configuration.

There is no way to recover the configuration if you lose your password.

rclone uses nacl secretbox which in turn uses XSalsa20 and Poly1305 to encrypt and authenticate your configuration with secret-key cryptography. The password is SHA-256 hashed, which produces the key for secretbox. The hashed password is not stored.

While this provides very good security, we do not recommend storing your encrypted rclone configuration in public if it contains sensitive information, maybe except if you use a very strong password.

If it is safe in your environment, you can set the RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS environment variable to contain your password, in which case it will be used for decrypting the configuration.

You can set this for a session from a script. For unix like systems save this to a file called set-rclone-password:

#!/bin/echo Source this file don't run it

read -s RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS
export RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS

Then source the file when you want to use it. From the shell you would do source set-rclone-password. It will then ask you for the password and set it in the environment variable.

If you are running rclone inside a script, you might want to disable password prompts. To do that, pass the parameter --ask-password=false to rclone. This will make rclone fail instead of asking for a password if RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS doesn't contain a valid password.

Developer options

These options are useful when developing or debugging rclone. There are also some more remote specific options which aren't documented here which are used for testing. These start with remote name eg --drive-test-option - see the docs for the remote in question.

--cpuprofile=FILE

Write CPU profile to file. This can be analysed with go tool pprof.

--dump-auth

Dump HTTP headers - will contain sensitive info such as Authorization: headers - use --dump-headers to dump without Authorization: headers. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging only.

--dump-bodies

Dump HTTP headers and bodies - may contain sensitive info. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging only.

--dump-filters

Dump the filters to the output. Useful to see exactly what include and exclude options are filtering on.

--dump-headers

Dump HTTP headers with Authorization: lines removed. May still contain sensitive info. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging only.

Use --dump-auth if you do want the Authorization: headers.

--memprofile=FILE

Write memory profile to file. This can be analysed with go tool pprof.

--no-check-certificate=true/false

--no-check-certificate controls whether a client verifies the server's certificate chain and host name. If --no-check-certificate is true, TLS accepts any certificate presented by the server and any host name in that certificate. In this mode, TLS is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

This option defaults to false.

This should be used only for testing.

--no-traverse

The --no-traverse flag controls whether the destination file system is traversed when using the copy or move commands. --no-traverse is not compatible with sync and will be ignored if you supply it with sync.

If you are only copying a small number of files and/or have a large number of files on the destination then --no-traverse will stop rclone listing the destination and save time.

However, if you are copying a large number of files, especially if you are doing a copy where lots of the files haven't changed and won't need copying then you shouldn't use --no-traverse.

It can also be used to reduce the memory usage of rclone when copying

• rclone --no-traverse copy src dst won't load either the source or destination listings into memory so will use the minimum amount of memory.

Filtering

For the filtering options

• --delete-excluded
• --filter
• --filter-from
• --exclude
• --exclude-from
• --include
• --include-from
• --files-from
• --min-size
• --max-size
• --min-age
• --max-age
• --dump-filters

See the filtering section.

Logging

rclone has 4 levels of logging, Error, Notice, Info and Debug.

By default, rclone logs to standard error. This means you can redirect standard error and still see the normal output of rclone commands (eg rclone ls).

By default, rclone will produce Error and Notice level messages.

If you use the -q flag, rclone will only produce Error messages.

If you use the -v flag, rclone will produce Error, Notice and Info messages.

If you use the -vv flag, rclone will produce Error, Notice, Info and Debug messages.

You can also control the log levels with the --log-level flag.

If you use the --log-file=FILE option, rclone will redirect Error, Info and Debug messages along with standard error to FILE.

If you use the --syslog flag then rclone will log to syslog and the --syslog-facility control which facility it uses.

Rclone prefixes all log messages with their level in capitals, eg INFO which makes it easy to grep the log file for different kinds of information.

Exit Code

If any errors occur during the command execution, rclone will exit with a non-zero exit code. This allows scripts to detect when rclone operations have failed.

During the startup phase, rclone will exit immediately if an error is detected in the configuration. There will always be a log message immediately before exiting.

When rclone is running it will accumulate errors as it goes along, and only exit with a non-zero exit code if (after retries) there were still failed transfers. For every error counted there will be a high priority log message (visible with -q) showing the message and which file caused the problem. A high priority message is also shown when starting a retry so the user can see that any previous error messages may not be valid after the retry. If rclone has done a retry it will log a high priority message if the retry was successful.

Environment Variables

Rclone can be configured entirely using environment variables. These can be used to set defaults for options or config file entries.

Options

Every option in rclone can have its default set by environment variable.

To find the name of the environment variable, first, take the long option name, strip the leading --, change - to _, make upper case and prepend RCLONE_.

For example, to always set --stats 5s, set the environment variable RCLONE_STATS=5s. If you set stats on the command line this will override the environment variable setting.

Or to always use the trash in drive --drive-use-trash, set RCLONE_DRIVE_USE_TRASH=true.

The same parser is used for the options and the environment variables so they take exactly the same form.

Config file

You can set defaults for values in the config file on an individual remote basis. If you want to use this feature, you will need to discover the name of the config items that you want. The easiest way is to run through rclone config by hand, then look in the config file to see what the values are (the config file can be found by looking at the help for --config in rclone help).

To find the name of the environment variable, you need to set, take RCLONE_ + name of remote + _ + name of config file option and make it all uppercase.

For example, to configure an S3 remote named mys3: without a config file (using unix ways of setting environment variables):

$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_TYPE=s3
$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXX
$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXX
$ rclone lsd MYS3:
          -1 2016-09-21 12:54:21        -1 my-bucket
$ rclone listremotes | grep mys3
mys3:

Note that if you want to create a remote using environment variables you must create the ..._TYPE variable as above.

Other environment variables

• RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS` set to contain your config file password (see Configuration Encryption section)
• HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY (or the lowercase versions thereof).
  • HTTPS_PROXY takes precedence over HTTP_PROXY for https requests.
  • The environment values may be either a complete URL or a "host[:port]" for, in which case the "http" scheme is assumed.

Configuring rclone on a remote / headless machine

Some of the configurations (those involving oauth2) require an Internet connected web browser.

If you are trying to set rclone up on a remote or headless box with no browser available on it (eg a NAS or a server in a datacenter) then you will need to use an alternative means of configuration. There are two ways of doing it, described below.

Configuring using rclone authorize

On the headless box

...
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> n
For this to work, you will need rclone available on a machine that has a web browser available.
Execute the following on your machine:
	rclone authorize "amazon cloud drive"
Then paste the result below:
result>

Then on your main desktop machine

rclone authorize "amazon cloud drive"
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
Paste the following into your remote machine --->
SECRET_TOKEN
<---End paste

Then back to the headless box, paste in the code

result> SECRET_TOKEN
--------------------
[acd12]
client_id = 
client_secret = 
token = SECRET_TOKEN
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d>

Configuring by copying the config file

Rclone stores all of its config in a single configuration file. This can easily be copied to configure a remote rclone.

So first configure rclone on your desktop machine

rclone config

to set up the config file.

Find the config file by running rclone -h and looking for the help for the --config option

$ rclone -h
[snip]
      --config="/home/user/.rclone.conf": Config file.
[snip]

Now transfer it to the remote box (scp, cut paste, ftp, sftp etc) and place it in the correct place (use rclone -h on the remote box to find out where).

Filtering, includes and excludes

Rclone has a sophisticated set of include and exclude rules. Some of these are based on patterns and some on other things like file size.

The filters are applied for the copy, sync, move, ls, lsl, md5sum, sha1sum, size, delete and check operations. Note that purge does not obey the filters.

Each path as it passes through rclone is matched against the include and exclude rules like --include, --exclude, --include-from, --exclude-from, --filter, or --filter-from. The simplest way to try them out is using the ls command, or --dry-run together with -v.

Patterns

The patterns used to match files for inclusion or exclusion are based on "file globs" as used by the unix shell.

If the pattern starts with a / then it only matches at the top level of the directory tree, relative to the root of the remote (not necessarily the root of the local drive). If it doesn't start with / then it is matched starting at the end of the path, but it will only match a complete path element:

file.jpg  - matches "file.jpg"
          - matches "directory/file.jpg"
          - doesn't match "afile.jpg"
          - doesn't match "directory/afile.jpg"
/file.jpg - matches "file.jpg" in the root directory of the remote
          - doesn't match "afile.jpg"
          - doesn't match "directory/file.jpg"

Important Note that you must use / in patterns and not \ even if running on Windows.

A * matches anything but not a /.

*.jpg  - matches "file.jpg"
       - matches "directory/file.jpg"
       - doesn't match "file.jpg/something"

Use ** to match anything, including slashes (/).

dir/** - matches "dir/file.jpg"
       - matches "dir/dir1/dir2/file.jpg"
       - doesn't match "directory/file.jpg"
       - doesn't match "adir/file.jpg"

A ? matches any character except a slash /.

l?ss  - matches "less"
      - matches "lass"
      - doesn't match "floss"

A [ and ] together make a a character class, such as [a-z] or [aeiou] or [[:alpha:]]. See the go regexp docs for more info on these.

h[ae]llo - matches "hello"
         - matches "hallo"
         - doesn't match "hullo"

A { and } define a choice between elements. It should contain a comma seperated list of patterns, any of which might match. These patterns can contain wildcards.

{one,two}_potato - matches "one_potato"
                 - matches "two_potato"
                 - doesn't match "three_potato"
                 - doesn't match "_potato"

Special characters can be escaped with a \ before them.

\*.jpg       - matches "*.jpg"
\\.jpg       - matches "\.jpg"
\[one\].jpg  - matches "[one].jpg"

Note also that rclone filter globs can only be used in one of the filter command line flags, not in the specification of the remote, so rclone copy "remote:dir*.jpg" /path/to/dir won't work - what is required is rclone --include "*.jpg" copy remote:dir /path/to/dir

Directories

Rclone keeps track of directories that could match any file patterns.

Eg if you add the include rule

/a/*.jpg

Rclone will synthesize the directory include rule

/a/

If you put any rules which end in / then it will only match directories.

Directory matches are only used to optimise directory access patterns - you must still match the files that you want to match. Directory matches won't optimise anything on bucket based remotes (eg s3, swift, google compute storage, b2) which don't have a concept of directory.

Differences between rsync and rclone patterns

Rclone implements bash style {a,b,c} glob matching which rsync doesn't.

Rclone always does a wildcard match so \ must always escape a \.

How the rules are used

Rclone maintains a combined list of include rules and exclude rules.

Each file is matched in order, starting from the top, against the rule in the list until it finds a match. The file is then included or excluded according to the rule type.

If the matcher fails to find a match after testing against all the entries in the list then the path is included.

For example given the following rules, + being include, - being exclude,

- secret*.jpg
+ *.jpg
+ *.png
+ file2.avi
- *

This would include

• file1.jpg
• file3.png
• file2.avi

This would exclude

• secret17.jpg
• non *.jpg and *.png

A similar process is done on directory entries before recursing into them. This only works on remotes which have a concept of directory (Eg local, google drive, onedrive, amazon drive) and not on bucket based remotes (eg s3, swift, google compute storage, b2).

Adding filtering rules

Filtering rules are added with the following command line flags.

Repeating options

You can repeat the following options to add more than one rule of that type.

• --include
• --include-from
• --exclude
• --exclude-from
• --filter
• --filter-from

Note that all the options of the same type are processed together in the order above, regardless of what order they were placed on the command line.

So all --include options are processed first in the order they appeared on the command line, then all --include-from options etc.

To mix up the order includes and excludes, the --filter flag can be used.

--exclude - Exclude files matching pattern

Add a single exclude rule with --exclude.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Eg --exclude *.bak to exclude all bak files from the sync.

--exclude-from - Read exclude patterns from file

Add exclude rules from a file.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Prepare a file like this exclude-file.txt

# a sample exclude rule file
*.bak
file2.jpg

Then use as --exclude-from exclude-file.txt. This will sync all files except those ending in bak and file2.jpg.

This is useful if you have a lot of rules.

--include - Include files matching pattern

Add a single include rule with --include.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Eg --include *.{png,jpg} to include all png and jpg files in the backup and no others.

This adds an implicit --exclude * at the very end of the filter list. This means you can mix --include and --include-from with the other filters (eg --exclude) but you must include all the files you want in the include statement. If this doesn't provide enough flexibility then you must use --filter-from.

--include-from - Read include patterns from file

Add include rules from a file.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Prepare a file like this include-file.txt

# a sample include rule file
*.jpg
*.png
file2.avi

Then use as --include-from include-file.txt. This will sync all jpg, png files and file2.avi.

This is useful if you have a lot of rules.

This adds an implicit --exclude * at the very end of the filter list. This means you can mix --include and --include-from with the other filters (eg --exclude) but you must include all the files you want in the include statement. If this doesn't provide enough flexibility then you must use --filter-from.

--filter - Add a file-filtering rule

This can be used to add a single include or exclude rule. Include rules start with + and exclude rules start with - . A special rule called ! can be used to clear the existing rules.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Eg --filter "- *.bak" to exclude all bak files from the sync.

--filter-from - Read filtering patterns from a file

Add include/exclude rules from a file.

This flag can be repeated. See above for the order the flags are processed in.

Prepare a file like this filter-file.txt

# a sample exclude rule file
- secret*.jpg
+ *.jpg
+ *.png
+ file2.avi
# exclude everything else
- *

Then use as --filter-from filter-file.txt. The rules are processed in the order that they are defined.

This example will include all jpg and png files, exclude any files matching secret*.jpg and include file2.avi. Everything else will be excluded from the sync.

--files-from - Read list of source-file names

This reads a list of file names from the file passed in and only these files are transferred. The filtering rules are ignored completely if you use this option.

This option can be repeated to read from more than one file. These are read in the order that they are placed on the command line.

Prepare a file like this files-from.txt

# comment
file1.jpg
file2.jpg

Then use as --files-from files-from.txt. This will only transfer file1.jpg and file2.jpg providing they exist.

For example, let's say you had a few files you want to back up regularly with these absolute paths:

/home/user1/important
/home/user1/dir/file
/home/user2/stuff

To copy these you'd find a common subdirectory - in this case /home and put the remaining files in files-from.txt with or without leading /, eg

user1/important
user1/dir/file
user2/stuff

You could then copy these to a remote like this

rclone copy --files-from files-from.txt /home remote:backup

The 3 files will arrive in remote:backup with the paths as in the files-from.txt.

You could of course choose / as the root too in which case your files-from.txt might look like this.

/home/user1/important
/home/user1/dir/file
/home/user2/stuff

And you would transfer it like this

rclone copy --files-from files-from.txt / remote:backup

In this case there will be an extra home directory on the remote.

--min-size - Don't transfer any file smaller than this

This option controls the minimum size file which will be transferred. This defaults to kBytes but a suffix of k, M, or G can be used.

For example --min-size 50k means no files smaller than 50kByte will be transferred.

--max-size - Don't transfer any file larger than this

This option controls the maximum size file which will be transferred. This defaults to kBytes but a suffix of k, M, or G can be used.

For example --max-size 1G means no files larger than 1GByte will be transferred.

--max-age - Don't transfer any file older than this

This option controls the maximum age of files to transfer. Give in seconds or with a suffix of:

• ms - Milliseconds
• s - Seconds
• m - Minutes
• h - Hours
• d - Days
• w - Weeks
• M - Months
• y - Years

For example --max-age 2d means no files older than 2 days will be transferred.

--min-age - Don't transfer any file younger than this

This option controls the minimum age of files to transfer. Give in seconds or with a suffix (see --max-age for list of suffixes)

For example --min-age 2d means no files younger than 2 days will be transferred.

--delete-excluded - Delete files on dest excluded from sync

Important this flag is dangerous - use with --dry-run and -v first.

When doing rclone sync this will delete any files which are excluded from the sync on the destination.

If for example you did a sync from A to B without the --min-size 50k flag

rclone sync A: B:

Then you repeated it like this with the --delete-excluded

rclone --min-size 50k --delete-excluded sync A: B:

This would delete all files on B which are less than 50 kBytes as these are now excluded from the sync.

Always test first with --dry-run and -v before using this flag.

--dump-filters - dump the filters to the output

This dumps the defined filters to the output as regular expressions.

Useful for debugging.

Quoting shell metacharacters

The examples above may not work verbatim in your shell as they have shell metacharacters in them (eg *), and may require quoting.

Eg linux, OSX

• --include \*.jpg
• --include '*.jpg'
• --include='*.jpg'

In Windows the expansion is done by the command not the shell so this should work fine

• --include *.jpg

Overview of cloud storage systems

Each cloud storage system is slighly different. Rclone attempts to provide a unified interface to them, but some underlying differences show through.

Features

Here is an overview of the major features of each cloud storage system.

Name	Hash	ModTime	Case Insensitive	Duplicate Files	MIME Type
Google Drive	MD5	Yes	No	Yes	R/W
Amazon S3	MD5	Yes	No	No	R/W
Openstack Swift	MD5	Yes	No	No	R/W
Dropbox	DBHASH †	Yes	Yes	No	-
Google Cloud Storage	MD5	Yes	No	No	R/W
Amazon Drive	MD5	No	Yes	No	R
Microsoft OneDrive	SHA1	Yes	Yes	No	R
Hubic	MD5	Yes	No	No	R/W
Backblaze B2	SHA1	Yes	No	No	R/W
Yandex Disk	MD5	Yes	No	No	R/W
SFTP	-	Yes	Depends	No	-
FTP	-	No	Yes	No	-
HTTP	-	No	Yes	No	R
The local filesystem	All	Yes	Depends	No	-

Hash

The cloud storage system supports various hash types of the objects.
The hashes are used when transferring data as an integrity check and can be specifically used with the --checksum flag in syncs and in the check command.

To use the checksum checks between filesystems they must support a common hash type.

† Note that Dropbox supports its own custom hash. This is an SHA256 sum of all the 4MB block SHA256s.

ModTime

The cloud storage system supports setting modification times on objects. If it does then this enables a using the modification times as part of the sync. If not then only the size will be checked by default, though the MD5SUM can be checked with the --checksum flag.

All cloud storage systems support some kind of date on the object and these will be set when transferring from the cloud storage system.

Case Insensitive

If a cloud storage systems is case sensitive then it is possible to have two files which differ only in case, eg file.txt and FILE.txt. If a cloud storage system is case insensitive then that isn't possible.

This can cause problems when syncing between a case insensitive system and a case sensitive system. The symptom of this is that no matter how many times you run the sync it never completes fully.

The local filesystem and SFTP may or may not be case sensitive depending on OS.

• Windows - usually case insensitive, though case is preserved
• OSX - usually case insensitive, though it is possible to format case sensitive
• Linux - usually case sensitive, but there are case insensitive file systems (eg FAT formatted USB keys)

Most of the time this doesn't cause any problems as people tend to avoid files whose name differs only by case even on case sensitive systems.

Duplicate files

If a cloud storage system allows duplicate files then it can have two objects with the same name.

This confuses rclone greatly when syncing - use the rclone dedupe command to rename or remove duplicates.

MIME Type

MIME types (also known as media types) classify types of documents using a simple text classification, eg text/html or application/pdf.

Some cloud storage systems support reading (R) the MIME type of objects and some support writing (W) the MIME type of objects.

The MIME type can be important if you are serving files directly to HTTP from the storage system.

If you are copying from a remote which supports reading (R) to a remote which supports writing (W) then rclone will preserve the MIME types. Otherwise they will be guessed from the extension, or the remote itself may assign the MIME type.

Optional Features

All the remotes support a basic set of features, but there are some optional features supported by some remotes used to make some operations more efficient.

Name	Purge	Copy	Move	DirMove	CleanUp	ListR
Google Drive	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No #575	No
Amazon S3	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Openstack Swift	Yes †	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Dropbox	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No #575	No
Google Cloud Storage	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Amazon Drive	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No #575	No
Microsoft OneDrive	Yes	Yes	Yes	No #197	No #575	No
Hubic	Yes †	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Backblaze B2	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
Yandex Disk	Yes	No	No	No	No #575	Yes
SFTP	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
FTP	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No
HTTP	No	No	No	No	No	No
The local filesystem	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No

Purge

This deletes a directory quicker than just deleting all the files in the directory.

† Note Swift and Hubic implement this in order to delete directory markers but they don't actually have a quicker way of deleting files other than deleting them individually.

Copy

Used when copying an object to and from the same remote. This known as a server side copy so you can copy a file without downloading it and uploading it again. It is used if you use rclone copy or rclone move if the remote doesn't support Move directly.

If the server doesn't support Copy directly then for copy operations the file is downloaded then re-uploaded.

Move

Used when moving/renaming an object on the same remote. This is known as a server side move of a file. This is used in rclone move if the server doesn't support DirMove.

If the server isn't capable of Move then rclone simulates it with Copy then delete. If the server doesn't support Copy then rclone will download the file and re-upload it.

DirMove

This is used to implement rclone move to move a directory if possible. If it isn't then it will use Move on each file (which falls back to Copy then download and upload - see Move section).

CleanUp

This is used for emptying the trash for a remote by rclone cleanup.

If the server can't do CleanUp then rclone cleanup will return an error.

ListR

The remote supports a recursive list to list all the contents beneath a directory quickly. This enables the --fast-list flag to work. See the rclone docs for more details.

Google Drive

Paths are specified as drive:path

Drive paths may be as deep as required, eg drive:directory/subdirectory.

The initial setup for drive involves getting a token from Google drive which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/r/c/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / FTP Connection
   \ "ftp"
 7 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 8 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 9 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
10 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
11 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
12 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
13 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
14 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 8
Google Application Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id> 
Google Application Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret> 
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine or Y didn't work
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
Configure this as a team drive?
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> n
--------------------
[remote]
client_id = 
client_secret = 
token = {"AccessToken":"xxxx.x.xxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","RefreshToken":"1/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","Expiry":"2014-03-16T13:57:58.955387075Z","Extra":null}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Google if you use auto config mode. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall, or use manual mode.

You can then use it like this,

List directories in top level of your drive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your drive

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to a drive directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Team drives

If you want to configure the remote to point to a Google Team Drive then answer y to the question Configure this as a team drive?.

This will fetch the list of Team Drives from google and allow you to configure which one you want to use. You can also type in a team drive ID if you prefer.

For example:

Configure this as a team drive?
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
Fetching team drive list...
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Rclone Test
   \ "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
 2 / Rclone Test 2
   \ "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy"
 3 / Rclone Test 3
   \ "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz"
Enter a Team Drive ID> 1
--------------------
[remote]
client_id = 
client_secret = 
token = {"AccessToken":"xxxx.x.xxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","RefreshToken":"1/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","Expiry":"2014-03-16T13:57:58.955387075Z","Extra":null}
team_drive = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Modified time

Google drive stores modification times accurate to 1 ms.

Revisions

Google drive stores revisions of files. When you upload a change to an existing file to google drive using rclone it will create a new revision of that file.

Revisions follow the standard google policy which at time of writing was

• They are deleted after 30 days or 100 revisions (whatever comes first).
• They do not count towards a user storage quota.

Deleting files

By default rclone will delete files permanently when requested. If sending them to the trash is required instead then use the --drive-use-trash flag.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--drive-auth-owner-only

Only consider files owned by the authenticated user.

--drive-chunk-size=SIZE

Upload chunk size. Must a power of 2 >= 256k. Default value is 8 MB.

Making this larger will improve performance, but note that each chunk is buffered in memory one per transfer.

Reducing this will reduce memory usage but decrease performance.

--drive-auth-owner-only

Only consider files owned by the authenticated user.

--drive-formats

Google documents can only be exported from Google drive. When rclone downloads a Google doc it chooses a format to download depending upon this setting.

By default the formats are docx,xlsx,pptx,svg which are a sensible default for an editable document.

When choosing a format, rclone runs down the list provided in order and chooses the first file format the doc can be exported as from the list. If the file can't be exported to a format on the formats list, then rclone will choose a format from the default list.

If you prefer an archive copy then you might use --drive-formats pdf, or if you prefer openoffice/libreoffice formats you might use --drive-formats ods,odt,odp.

Note that rclone adds the extension to the google doc, so if it is calles My Spreadsheet on google docs, it will be exported as My Spreadsheet.xlsx or My Spreadsheet.pdf etc.

Here are the possible extensions with their corresponding mime types.

Extension	Mime Type	Description
csv	text/csv	Standard CSV format for Spreadsheets
doc	application/msword	Micosoft Office Document
docx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document	Microsoft Office Document
epub	application/epub+zip	E-book format
html	text/html	An HTML Document
jpg	image/jpeg	A JPEG Image File
odp	application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation	Openoffice Presentation
ods	application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet	Openoffice Spreadsheet
ods	application/x-vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet	Openoffice Spreadsheet
odt	application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text	Openoffice Document
pdf	application/pdf	Adobe PDF Format
png	image/png	PNG Image Format
pptx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation	Microsoft Office Powerpoint
rtf	application/rtf	Rich Text Format
svg	image/svg+xml	Scalable Vector Graphics Format
tsv	text/tab-separated-values	Standard TSV format for spreadsheets
txt	text/plain	Plain Text
xls	application/vnd.ms-excel	Microsoft Office Spreadsheet
xlsx	application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet	Microsoft Office Spreadsheet
zip	application/zip	A ZIP file of HTML, Images CSS

--drive-list-chunk int

Size of listing chunk 100-1000. 0 to disable. (default 1000)

--drive-shared-with-me

Only show files that are shared with me

--drive-skip-gdocs

Skip google documents in all listings. If given, gdocs practically become invisible to rclone.

--drive-trashed-only

Only show files that are in the trash. This will show trashed files in their original directory structure.

--drive-upload-cutoff=SIZE

File size cutoff for switching to chunked upload. Default is 8 MB.

--drive-use-trash

Send files to the trash instead of deleting permanently. Defaults to off, namely deleting files permanently.

Limitations

Drive has quite a lot of rate limiting. This causes rclone to be limited to transferring about 2 files per second only. Individual files may be transferred much faster at 100s of MBytes/s but lots of small files can take a long time.

Duplicated files

Sometimes, for no reason I've been able to track down, drive will duplicate a file that rclone uploads. Drive unlike all the other remotes can have duplicated files.

Duplicated files cause problems with the syncing and you will see messages in the log about duplicates.

Use rclone dedupe to fix duplicated files.

Note that this isn't just a problem with rclone, even Google Photos on Android duplicates files on drive sometimes.

Rclone appears to be re-copying files it shouldn't

There are two possible reasons for rclone to recopy files which haven't changed to Google Drive.

The first is the duplicated file issue above - run rclone dedupe and check your logs for duplicate object or directory messages.

The second is that sometimes Google reports different sizes for the Google Docs exports which will cause rclone to re-download Google Docs for no apparent reason. --ignore-size is a not very satisfactory work-around for this if it is causing you a lot of problems.

Google docs downloads sometimes fail with "Failed to copy: read X bytes expecting Y"

This is the same problem as above. Google reports the google doc is one size, but rclone downloads a different size. Work-around with the --ignore-size flag or wait for rclone to retry the download which it will.

Making your own client_id

When you use rclone with Google drive in its default configuration you are using rclone's client_id. This is shared between all the rclone users. There is a global rate limit on the number of queries per second that each client_id can do set by Google. rclone already has a high quota and I will continue to make sure it is high enough by contacting Google.

However you might find you get better performance making your own client_id if you are a heavy user. Or you may not depending on exactly how Google have been raising rclone's rate limit.

Here is how to create your own Google Drive client ID for rclone:

1. Log into the Google API Console with your Google account. It doesn't matter what Google account you use. (It need not be the same account as the Google Drive you want to access)

2. Select a project or create a new project.

3. Under Overview, Google APIs, Google Apps APIs, click "Drive API", then "Enable".

4. Click "Credentials" in the left-side panel (not "Go to credentials", which opens the wizard), then "Create credentials", then "OAuth client ID". It will prompt you to set the OAuth consent screen product name, if you haven't set one already.

5. Choose an application type of "other", and click "Create". (the default name is fine)

6. It will show you a client ID and client secret. Use these values in rclone config to add a new remote or edit an existing remote.

(Thanks to @balazer on github for these instructions.)

Amazon S3

Paths are specified as remote:bucket (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:bucket/path/to/dir.

Here is an example of making an s3 configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
n/s> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 2
Get AWS credentials from runtime (environment variables or EC2 meta data if no env vars). Only applies if access_key_id and secret_access_key is blank.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Enter AWS credentials in the next step
   \ "false"
 2 / Get AWS credentials from the environment (env vars or IAM)
   \ "true"
env_auth> 1
AWS Access Key ID - leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
access_key_id> access_key
AWS Secret Access Key (password) - leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
secret_access_key> secret_key
Region to connect to.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
   / The default endpoint - a good choice if you are unsure.
 1 | US Region, Northern Virginia or Pacific Northwest.
   | Leave location constraint empty.
   \ "us-east-1"
   / US West (Oregon) Region
 2 | Needs location constraint us-west-2.
   \ "us-west-2"
   / US West (Northern California) Region
 3 | Needs location constraint us-west-1.
   \ "us-west-1"
   / EU (Ireland) Region Region
 4 | Needs location constraint EU or eu-west-1.
   \ "eu-west-1"
   / EU (Frankfurt) Region
 5 | Needs location constraint eu-central-1.
   \ "eu-central-1"
   / Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region
 6 | Needs location constraint ap-southeast-1.
   \ "ap-southeast-1"
   / Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region
 7 | Needs location constraint ap-southeast-2.
   \ "ap-southeast-2"
   / Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region
 8 | Needs location constraint ap-northeast-1.
   \ "ap-northeast-1"
   / Asia Pacific (Seoul)
 9 | Needs location constraint ap-northeast-2.
   \ "ap-northeast-2"
   / Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
10 | Needs location constraint ap-south-1.
   \ "ap-south-1"
   / South America (Sao Paulo) Region
11 | Needs location constraint sa-east-1.
   \ "sa-east-1"
   / If using an S3 clone that only understands v2 signatures
12 | eg Ceph/Dreamhost
   | set this and make sure you set the endpoint.
   \ "other-v2-signature"
   / If using an S3 clone that understands v4 signatures set this
13 | and make sure you set the endpoint.
   \ "other-v4-signature"
region> 1
Endpoint for S3 API.
Leave blank if using AWS to use the default endpoint for the region.
Specify if using an S3 clone such as Ceph.
endpoint>
Location constraint - must be set to match the Region. Used when creating buckets only.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Empty for US Region, Northern Virginia or Pacific Northwest.
   \ ""
 2 / US West (Oregon) Region.
   \ "us-west-2"
 3 / US West (Northern California) Region.
   \ "us-west-1"
 4 / EU (Ireland) Region.
   \ "eu-west-1"
 5 / EU Region.
   \ "EU"
 6 / Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region.
   \ "ap-southeast-1"
 7 / Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.
   \ "ap-southeast-2"
 8 / Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region.
   \ "ap-northeast-1"
 9 / Asia Pacific (Seoul)
   \ "ap-northeast-2"
10 / Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
   \ "ap-south-1"
11 / South America (Sao Paulo) Region.
   \ "sa-east-1"
location_constraint> 1
Canned ACL used when creating buckets and/or storing objects in S3.
For more info visit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/acl-overview.html#canned-acl
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. No one else has access rights (default).
   \ "private"
 2 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AllUsers group gets READ access.
   \ "public-read"
   / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AllUsers group gets READ and WRITE access.
 3 | Granting this on a bucket is generally not recommended.
   \ "public-read-write"
 4 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AuthenticatedUsers group gets READ access.
   \ "authenticated-read"
   / Object owner gets FULL_CONTROL. Bucket owner gets READ access.
 5 | If you specify this canned ACL when creating a bucket, Amazon S3 ignores it.
   \ "bucket-owner-read"
   / Both the object owner and the bucket owner get FULL_CONTROL over the object.
 6 | If you specify this canned ACL when creating a bucket, Amazon S3 ignores it.
   \ "bucket-owner-full-control"
acl> private
The server-side encryption algorithm used when storing this object in S3.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / None
   \ ""
 2 / AES256
   \ "AES256"
server_side_encryption>
The storage class to use when storing objects in S3.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Default
   \ ""
 2 / Standard storage class
   \ "STANDARD"
 3 / Reduced redundancy storage class
   \ "REDUCED_REDUNDANCY"
 4 / Standard Infrequent Access storage class
   \ "STANDARD_IA"
storage_class>
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
env_auth = false
access_key_id = access_key
secret_access_key = secret_key
region = us-east-1
endpoint =
location_constraint =
acl = private
server_side_encryption =
storage_class =
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all buckets

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new bucket

rclone mkdir remote:bucket

List the contents of a bucket

rclone ls remote:bucket

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote bucket, deleting any excess files in the bucket.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:bucket

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

The modified time is stored as metadata on the object as X-Amz-Meta-Mtime as floating point since the epoch accurate to 1 ns.

Multipart uploads

rclone supports multipart uploads with S3 which means that it can upload files bigger than 5GB. Note that files uploaded with multipart upload don't have an MD5SUM.

Buckets and Regions

With Amazon S3 you can list buckets (rclone lsd) using any region, but you can only access the content of a bucket from the region it was created in. If you attempt to access a bucket from the wrong region, you will get an error, incorrect region, the bucket is not in 'XXX' region.

Authentication

There are two ways to supply rclone with a set of AWS credentials. In order of precedence:

• Directly in the rclone configuration file (as configured by rclone config)
  • set access_key_id and secret_access_key
• Runtime configuration:
  • set env_auth to true in the config file
  • Exporting the following environment variables before running rclone
    • Access Key ID: AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID or AWS_ACCESS_KEY
    • Secret Access Key: AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY or AWS_SECRET_KEY
  • Running rclone on an EC2 instance with an IAM role

If none of these option actually end up providing rclone with AWS credentials then S3 interaction will be non-authenticated (see below).

S3 Permissions

When using the sync subcommand of rclone the following minimum permissions are required to be available on the bucket being written to:

• ListBucket
• DeleteObject
• GetObject
• PutObject
• PutObjectACL

Example policy:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::USER_SID:user/USER_NAME"
            },
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:DeleteObject",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:PutObject",
                "s3:PutObjectAcl"
            ],
            "Resource": [
              "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME/*",
              "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Notes on above:

1. This is a policy that can be used when creating bucket. It assumes that USER_NAME has been created.
2. The Resource entry must include both resource ARNs, as one implies the bucket and the other implies the bucket's objects.

For reference, here's an Ansible script that will generate one or more buckets that will work with rclone sync.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--s3-acl=STRING

Canned ACL used when creating buckets and/or storing objects in S3.

For more info visit the canned ACL docs.

--s3-storage-class=STRING

Storage class to upload new objects with.

Available options include:

• STANDARD - default storage class
• STANDARD_IA - for less frequently accessed data (e.g backups)
• REDUCED_REDUNDANCY (only for noncritical, reproducible data, has lower redundancy)

Anonymous access to public buckets

If you want to use rclone to access a public bucket, configure with a blank access_key_id and secret_access_key. Eg

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
q) Quit config
n/q> n
name> anons3
What type of source is it?
Choose a number from below
 1) amazon cloud drive
 2) b2
 3) drive
 4) dropbox
 5) google cloud storage
 6) swift
 7) hubic
 8) local
 9) onedrive
10) s3
11) yandex
type> 10
Get AWS credentials from runtime (environment variables or EC2 meta data if no env vars). Only applies if access_key_id and secret_access_key is blank.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 * Enter AWS credentials in the next step
 1) false
 * Get AWS credentials from the environment (env vars or IAM)
 2) true
env_auth> 1
AWS Access Key ID - leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
access_key_id>
AWS Secret Access Key (password) - leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
secret_access_key>
...

Then use it as normal with the name of the public bucket, eg

rclone lsd anons3:1000genomes

You will be able to list and copy data but not upload it.

Ceph

Ceph is an object storage system which presents an Amazon S3 interface.

To use rclone with ceph, you need to set the following parameters in the config.

access_key_id = Whatever
secret_access_key = Whatever
endpoint = https://ceph.endpoint.goes.here/
region = other-v2-signature

Note also that Ceph sometimes puts / in the passwords it gives users. If you read the secret access key using the command line tools you will get a JSON blob with the / escaped as \/. Make sure you only write / in the secret access key.

Eg the dump from Ceph looks something like this (irrelevant keys removed).

{
    "user_id": "xxx",
    "display_name": "xxxx",
    "keys": [
        {
            "user": "xxx",
            "access_key": "xxxxxx",
            "secret_key": "xxxxxx\/xxxx"
        }
    ],
}

Because this is a json dump, it is encoding the / as \/, so if you use the secret key as xxxxxx/xxxx it will work fine.

Minio

Minio is an object storage server built for cloud application developers and devops.

It is very easy to install and provides an S3 compatible server which can be used by rclone.

To use it, install Minio following the instructions here.

When it configures itself Minio will print something like this

Endpoint:  http://192.168.1.106:9000  http://172.23.0.1:9000
AccessKey: USWUXHGYZQYFYFFIT3RE
SecretKey: MOJRH0mkL1IPauahWITSVvyDrQbEEIwljvmxdq03
Region:    us-east-1
SQS ARNs:  arn:minio:sqs:us-east-1:1:redis arn:minio:sqs:us-east-1:2:redis

Browser Access:
   http://192.168.1.106:9000  http://172.23.0.1:9000

Command-line Access: https://docs.minio.io/docs/minio-client-quickstart-guide
   $ mc config host add myminio http://192.168.1.106:9000 USWUXHGYZQYFYFFIT3RE MOJRH0mkL1IPauahWITSVvyDrQbEEIwljvmxdq03

Object API (Amazon S3 compatible):
   Go:         https://docs.minio.io/docs/golang-client-quickstart-guide
   Java:       https://docs.minio.io/docs/java-client-quickstart-guide
   Python:     https://docs.minio.io/docs/python-client-quickstart-guide
   JavaScript: https://docs.minio.io/docs/javascript-client-quickstart-guide
   .NET:       https://docs.minio.io/docs/dotnet-client-quickstart-guide

Drive Capacity: 26 GiB Free, 165 GiB Total

These details need to go into rclone config like this. Note that it is important to put the region in as stated above.

env_auth> 1
access_key_id> USWUXHGYZQYFYFFIT3RE
secret_access_key> MOJRH0mkL1IPauahWITSVvyDrQbEEIwljvmxdq03
region> us-east-1
endpoint> http://192.168.1.106:9000
location_constraint>
server_side_encryption>

Which makes the config file look like this

[minio]
env_auth = false
access_key_id = USWUXHGYZQYFYFFIT3RE
secret_access_key = MOJRH0mkL1IPauahWITSVvyDrQbEEIwljvmxdq03
region = us-east-1
endpoint = http://192.168.1.106:9000
location_constraint =
server_side_encryption =

So once set up, for example to copy files into a bucket

rclone copy /path/to/files minio:bucket

Swift

Swift refers to Openstack Object Storage. Commercial implementations of that being:

• Rackspace Cloud Files
• Memset Memstore

Paths are specified as remote:container (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:container/path/to/dir.

Here is an example of making a swift configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
n/s> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 11
User name to log in.
user> user_name
API key or password.
key> password_or_api_key
Authentication URL for server.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Rackspace US
   \ "https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0"
 2 / Rackspace UK
   \ "https://lon.auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0"
 3 / Rackspace v2
   \ "https://identity.api.rackspacecloud.com/v2.0"
 4 / Memset Memstore UK
   \ "https://auth.storage.memset.com/v1.0"
 5 / Memset Memstore UK v2
   \ "https://auth.storage.memset.com/v2.0"
 6 / OVH
   \ "https://auth.cloud.ovh.net/v2.0"
auth> 1
User domain - optional (v3 auth)
domain> Default
Tenant name - optional for v1 auth, required otherwise
tenant> tenant_name
Tenant domain - optional (v3 auth)
tenant_domain>
Region name - optional
region>
Storage URL - optional
storage_url>
AuthVersion - optional - set to (1,2,3) if your auth URL has no version
auth_version>
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
user = user_name
key = password_or_api_key
auth = https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0
domain = Default
tenant =
tenant_domain =
region =
storage_url =
auth_version =
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all containers

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new container

rclone mkdir remote:container

List the contents of a container

rclone ls remote:container

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote container, deleting any excess files in the container.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:container

Configuration from an Openstack credentials file

An Opentstack credentials file typically looks something something like this (without the comments)

export OS_AUTH_URL=https://a.provider.net/v2.0
export OS_TENANT_ID=ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
export OS_TENANT_NAME="1234567890123456"
export OS_USERNAME="123abc567xy"
echo "Please enter your OpenStack Password: "
read -sr OS_PASSWORD_INPUT
export OS_PASSWORD=$OS_PASSWORD_INPUT
export OS_REGION_NAME="SBG1"
if [ -z "$OS_REGION_NAME" ]; then unset OS_REGION_NAME; fi

The config file needs to look something like this where $OS_USERNAME represents the value of the OS_USERNAME variable - 123abc567xy in the example above.

[remote]
type = swift
user = $OS_USERNAME
key = $OS_PASSWORD
auth = $OS_AUTH_URL
tenant = $OS_TENANT_NAME

Note that you may (or may not) need to set region too - try without first.

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--swift-chunk-size=SIZE

Above this size files will be chunked into a _segments container. The default for this is 5GB which is its maximum value.

Modified time

The modified time is stored as metadata on the object as X-Object-Meta-Mtime as floating point since the epoch accurate to 1 ns.

This is a defacto standard (used in the official python-swiftclient amongst others) for storing the modification time for an object.

Limitations

The Swift API doesn't return a correct MD5SUM for segmented files (Dynamic or Static Large Objects) so rclone won't check or use the MD5SUM for these.

Troubleshooting

Rclone gives Failed to create file system for "remote:": Bad Request

Due to an oddity of the underlying swift library, it gives a "Bad Request" error rather than a more sensible error when the authentication fails for Swift.

So this most likely means your username / password is wrong. You can investigate further with the --dump-bodies flag.

This may also be caused by specifying the region when you shouldn't have (eg OVH).

Rclone gives Failed to create file system: Response didn't have storage storage url and auth token

This is most likely caused by forgetting to specify your tenant when setting up a swift remote.

Dropbox

Paths are specified as remote:path

Dropbox paths may be as deep as required, eg remote:directory/subdirectory.

The initial setup for dropbox involves getting a token from Dropbox which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config
e/n/d/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 4
Dropbox App Key - leave blank normally.
app_key>
Dropbox App Secret - leave blank normally.
app_secret>
Remote config
Please visit:
https://www.dropbox.com/1/oauth2/authorize?client_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&response_type=code
Enter the code: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_XXXXXXXXXX
--------------------
[remote]
app_key =
app_secret =
token = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

You can then use it like this,

List directories in top level of your dropbox

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your dropbox

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to a dropbox directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and Hashes

Dropbox supports modified times, but the only way to set a modification time is to re-upload the file.

This means that if you uploaded your data with an older version of rclone which didn't support the v2 API and modified times, rclone will decide to upload all your old data to fix the modification times. If you don't want this to happen use --size-only or --checksum flag to stop it.

Dropbox supports its own hash type which is checked for all transfers.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--dropbox-chunk-size=SIZE

Upload chunk size. Max 150M. The default is 128MB. Note that this isn't buffered into memory.

Limitations

Note that Dropbox is case insensitive so you can't have a file called "Hello.doc" and one called "hello.doc".

There are some file names such as thumbs.db which Dropbox can't store. There is a full list of them in the "Ignored Files" section of this document. Rclone will issue an error message File name disallowed - not uploading if it attempt to upload one of those file names, but the sync won't fail.

If you have more than 10,000 files in a directory then rclone purge dropbox:dir will return the error Failed to purge: There are too many files involved in this operation. As a work-around do an rclone delete dropbox:dir followed by an rclone rmdir dropbox:dir.

Google Cloud Storage

Paths are specified as remote:bucket (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:bucket/path/to/dir.

The initial setup for google cloud storage involves getting a token from Google Cloud Storage which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config
e/n/d/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 6
Google Application Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id>
Google Application Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret>
Project number optional - needed only for list/create/delete buckets - see your developer console.
project_number> 12345678
Service Account Credentials JSON file path - needed only if you want use SA instead of interactive login.
service_account_file>
Access Control List for new objects.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Object owner gets OWNER access, and all Authenticated Users get READER access.
   \ "authenticatedRead"
 2 / Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team owners get OWNER access.
   \ "bucketOwnerFullControl"
 3 / Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team owners get READER access.
   \ "bucketOwnerRead"
 4 / Object owner gets OWNER access [default if left blank].
   \ "private"
 5 / Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team members get access according to their roles.
   \ "projectPrivate"
 6 / Object owner gets OWNER access, and all Users get READER access.
   \ "publicRead"
object_acl> 4
Access Control List for new buckets.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Authenticated Users get READER access.
   \ "authenticatedRead"
 2 / Project team owners get OWNER access [default if left blank].
   \ "private"
 3 / Project team members get access according to their roles.
   \ "projectPrivate"
 4 / Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Users get READER access.
   \ "publicRead"
 5 / Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Users get WRITER access.
   \ "publicReadWrite"
bucket_acl> 2
Location for the newly created buckets.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Empty for default location (US).
   \ ""
 2 / Multi-regional location for Asia.
   \ "asia"
 3 / Multi-regional location for Europe.
   \ "eu"
 4 / Multi-regional location for United States.
   \ "us"
 5 / Taiwan.
   \ "asia-east1"
 6 / Tokyo.
   \ "asia-northeast1"
 7 / Singapore.
   \ "asia-southeast1"
 8 / Sydney.
   \ "australia-southeast1"
 9 / Belgium.
   \ "europe-west1"
10 / London.
   \ "europe-west2"
11 / Iowa.
   \ "us-central1"
12 / South Carolina.
   \ "us-east1"
13 / Northern Virginia.
   \ "us-east4"
14 / Oregon.
   \ "us-west1"
location> 12
The storage class to use when storing objects in Google Cloud Storage.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Default
   \ ""
 2 / Multi-regional storage class
   \ "MULTI_REGIONAL"
 3 / Regional storage class
   \ "REGIONAL"
 4 / Nearline storage class
   \ "NEARLINE"
 5 / Coldline storage class
   \ "COLDLINE"
 6 / Durable reduced availability storage class
   \ "DURABLE_REDUCED_AVAILABILITY"
storage_class> 5
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine or Y didn't work
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[remote]
type = google cloud storage
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"AccessToken":"xxxx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","RefreshToken":"x/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxx","Expiry":"2014-07-17T20:49:14.929208288+01:00","Extra":null}
project_number = 12345678
object_acl = private
bucket_acl = private
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Google if you use auto config mode. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall, or use manual mode.

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all the buckets in your project

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new bucket

rclone mkdir remote:bucket

List the contents of a bucket

rclone ls remote:bucket

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote bucket, deleting any excess files in the bucket.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:bucket

Service Account support

You can set up rclone with Google Cloud Storage in an unattended mode, i.e. not tied to a specific end-user Google account. This is useful when you want to synchronise files onto machines that don't have actively logged-in users, for example build machines.

To get credentials for Google Cloud Platform IAM Service Accounts, please head to the Service Account section of the Google Developer Console. Service Accounts behave just like normal User permissions in Google Cloud Storage ACLs, so you can limit their access (e.g. make them read only). After creating an account, a JSON file containing the Service Account's credentials will be downloaded onto your machines. These credentials are what rclone will use for authentication.

To use a Service Account instead of OAuth2 token flow, enter the path to your Service Account credentials at the service_account_file prompt and rclone won't use the browser based authentication flow.

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

Google google cloud storage stores md5sums natively and rclone stores modification times as metadata on the object, under the "mtime" key in RFC3339 format accurate to 1ns.

Amazon Drive

Paths are specified as remote:path

Paths may be as deep as required, eg remote:directory/subdirectory.

The initial setup for Amazon Drive involves getting a token from Amazon which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

The configuration process for Amazon Drive may involve using an oauth proxy. This is used to keep the Amazon credentials out of the source code. The proxy runs in Google's very secure App Engine environment and doesn't store any credentials which pass through it.

NB rclone doesn't not currently have its own Amazon Drive credentials (see the forum for why) so you will either need to have your own client_id and client_secret with Amazon Drive, or use a a third party ouath proxy in which case you will need to enter client_id, client_secret, auth_url and token_url.

Note also if you are not using Amazon's auth_url and token_url, (ie you filled in something for those) then if setting up on a remote machine you can only use the copying the config method of configuration

• rclone authorize will not work.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/r/c/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / FTP Connection
   \ "ftp"
 7 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 8 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 9 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
10 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
11 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
12 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
13 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
14 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 1
Amazon Application Client Id - required.
client_id> your client ID goes here
Amazon Application Client Secret - required.
client_secret> your client secret goes here
Auth server URL - leave blank to use Amazon's.
auth_url> Optional auth URL
Token server url - leave blank to use Amazon's.
token_url> Optional token URL
Remote config
Make sure your Redirect URL is set to "http://127.0.0.1:53682/" in your custom config.
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[remote]
client_id = your client ID goes here
client_secret = your client secret goes here
auth_url = Optional auth URL
token_url = Optional token URL
token = {"access_token":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","token_type":"bearer","refresh_token":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","expiry":"2015-09-06T16:07:39.658438471+01:00"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

See the remote setup docs for how to set it up on a machine with no Internet browser available.

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Amazon. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall.

Once configured you can then use rclone like this,

List directories in top level of your Amazon Drive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your Amazon Drive

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to an Amazon Drive directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and MD5SUMs

Amazon Drive doesn't allow modification times to be changed via the API so these won't be accurate or used for syncing.

It does store MD5SUMs so for a more accurate sync, you can use the --checksum flag.

Deleting files

Any files you delete with rclone will end up in the trash. Amazon don't provide an API to permanently delete files, nor to empty the trash, so you will have to do that with one of Amazon's apps or via the Amazon Drive website. As of November 17, 2016, files are automatically deleted by Amazon from the trash after 30 days.

Using with non .com Amazon accounts

Let's say you usually use amazon.co.uk. When you authenticate with rclone it will take you to an amazon.com page to log in. Your amazon.co.uk email and password should work here just fine.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--acd-templink-threshold=SIZE

Files this size or more will be downloaded via their tempLink. This is to work around a problem with Amazon Drive which blocks downloads of files bigger than about 10GB. The default for this is 9GB which shouldn't need to be changed.

To download files above this threshold, rclone requests a tempLink which downloads the file through a temporary URL directly from the underlying S3 storage.

--acd-upload-wait-per-gb=TIME

Sometimes Amazon Drive gives an error when a file has been fully uploaded but the file appears anyway after a little while. This happens sometimes for files over 1GB in size and nearly every time for files bigger than 10GB. This parameter controls the time rclone waits for the file to appear.

The default value for this parameter is 3 minutes per GB, so by default it will wait 3 minutes for every GB uploaded to see if the file appears.

You can disable this feature by setting it to 0. This may cause conflict errors as rclone retries the failed upload but the file will most likely appear correctly eventually.

These values were determined empirically by observing lots of uploads of big files for a range of file sizes.

Upload with the -v flag to see more info about what rclone is doing in this situation.

Limitations

Note that Amazon Drive is case insensitive so you can't have a file called "Hello.doc" and one called "hello.doc".

Amazon Drive has rate limiting so you may notice errors in the sync (429 errors). rclone will automatically retry the sync up to 3 times by default (see --retries flag) which should hopefully work around this problem.

Amazon Drive has an internal limit of file sizes that can be uploaded to the service. This limit is not officially published, but all files larger than this will fail.

At the time of writing (Jan 2016) is in the area of 50GB per file. This means that larger files are likely to fail.

Unfortunately there is no way for rclone to see that this failure is because of file size, so it will retry the operation, as any other failure. To avoid this problem, use --max-size 50000M option to limit the maximum size of uploaded files. Note that --max-size does not split files into segments, it only ignores files over this size.

Microsoft OneDrive

Paths are specified as remote:path

Paths may be as deep as required, eg remote:directory/subdirectory.

The initial setup for OneDrive involves getting a token from Microsoft which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
n/s> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 10
Microsoft App Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id>
Microsoft App Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret>
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[remote]
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"access_token":"XXXXXX"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

See the remote setup docs for how to set it up on a machine with no Internet browser available.

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Microsoft. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall.

Once configured you can then use rclone like this,

List directories in top level of your OneDrive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your OneDrive

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to an OneDrive directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and hashes

OneDrive allows modification times to be set on objects accurate to 1 second. These will be used to detect whether objects need syncing or not.

One drive supports SHA1 type hashes, so you can use --checksum flag.

Deleting files

Any files you delete with rclone will end up in the trash. Microsoft doesn't provide an API to permanently delete files, nor to empty the trash, so you will have to do that with one of Microsoft's apps or via the OneDrive website.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--onedrive-chunk-size=SIZE

Above this size files will be chunked - must be multiple of 320k. The default is 10MB. Note that the chunks will be buffered into memory.

--onedrive-upload-cutoff=SIZE

Cutoff for switching to chunked upload - must be <= 100MB. The default is 10MB.

Limitations

Note that OneDrive is case insensitive so you can't have a file called "Hello.doc" and one called "hello.doc".

Rclone only supports your default OneDrive, and doesn't work with One Drive for business. Both these issues may be fixed at some point depending on user demand!

There are quite a few characters that can't be in OneDrive file names. These can't occur on Windows platforms, but on non-Windows platforms they are common. Rclone will map these names to and from an identical looking unicode equivalent. For example if a file has a ? in it will be mapped to ？ instead.

The largest allowed file size is 10GiB (10,737,418,240 bytes).

Hubic

Paths are specified as remote:path

Paths are specified as remote:container (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:container/path/to/dir.

The initial setup for Hubic involves getting a token from Hubic which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
n/s> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 8
Hubic Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id>
Hubic Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret>
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[remote]
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"access_token":"XXXXXX"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

See the remote setup docs for how to set it up on a machine with no Internet browser available.

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Hubic. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall.

Once configured you can then use rclone like this,

List containers in the top level of your Hubic

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your Hubic

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to an Hubic directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

If you want the directory to be visible in the official Hubic browser, you need to copy your files to the default directory

rclone copy /home/source remote:default/backup

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

The modified time is stored as metadata on the object as X-Object-Meta-Mtime as floating point since the epoch accurate to 1 ns.

This is a defacto standard (used in the official python-swiftclient amongst others) for storing the modification time for an object.

Note that Hubic wraps the Swift backend, so most of the properties of are the same.

Limitations

This uses the normal OpenStack Swift mechanism to refresh the Swift API credentials and ignores the expires field returned by the Hubic API.

The Swift API doesn't return a correct MD5SUM for segmented files (Dynamic or Static Large Objects) so rclone won't check or use the MD5SUM for these.

Backblaze B2

B2 is Backblaze's cloud storage system.

Paths are specified as remote:bucket (or remote: for the lsd command.) You may put subdirectories in too, eg remote:bucket/path/to/dir.

Here is an example of making a b2 configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process. You will need your account number (a short hex number) and key (a long hex number) which you can get from the b2 control panel.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
q) Quit config
n/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 3
Account ID
account> 123456789abc
Application Key
key> 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789
Endpoint for the service - leave blank normally.
endpoint>
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
account = 123456789abc
key = 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789
endpoint =
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all buckets

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new bucket

rclone mkdir remote:bucket

List the contents of a bucket

rclone ls remote:bucket

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote bucket, deleting any excess files in the bucket.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:bucket

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

The modified time is stored as metadata on the object as X-Bz-Info-src_last_modified_millis as milliseconds since 1970-01-01 in the Backblaze standard. Other tools should be able to use this as a modified time.

Modified times are used in syncing and are fully supported except in the case of updating a modification time on an existing object. In this case the object will be uploaded again as B2 doesn't have an API method to set the modification time independent of doing an upload.

SHA1 checksums

The SHA1 checksums of the files are checked on upload and download and will be used in the syncing process.

Large files which are uploaded in chunks will store their SHA1 on the object as X-Bz-Info-large_file_sha1 as recommended by Backblaze.

Transfers

Backblaze recommends that you do lots of transfers simultaneously for maximum speed. In tests from my SSD equiped laptop the optimum setting is about --transfers 32 though higher numbers may be used for a slight speed improvement. The optimum number for you may vary depending on your hardware, how big the files are, how much you want to load your computer, etc. The default of --transfers 4 is definitely too low for Backblaze B2 though.

Note that uploading big files (bigger than 200 MB by default) will use a 96 MB RAM buffer by default. There can be at most --transfers of these in use at any moment, so this sets the upper limit on the memory used.

Versions

When rclone uploads a new version of a file it creates a new version of it. Likewise when you delete a file, the old version will still be available.

Old versions of files are visible using the --b2-versions flag.

If you wish to remove all the old versions then you can use the rclone cleanup remote:bucket command which will delete all the old versions of files, leaving the current ones intact. You can also supply a path and only old versions under that path will be deleted, eg rclone cleanup remote:bucket/path/to/stuff.

When you purge a bucket, the current and the old versions will be deleted then the bucket will be deleted.

However delete will cause the current versions of the files to become hidden old versions.

Here is a session showing the listing and and retreival of an old version followed by a cleanup of the old versions.

Show current version and all the versions with --b2-versions flag.

$ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt

$ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt
        8 one-v2016-07-04-141032-000.txt
       16 one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt
       15 one-v2016-07-02-155621-000.txt

Retreive an old verson

$ rclone -q --b2-versions copy b2:cleanup-test/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt /tmp

$ ls -l /tmp/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ncw ncw 16 Jul  2 17:46 /tmp/one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt

Clean up all the old versions and show that they've gone.

$ rclone -q cleanup b2:cleanup-test

$ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt

$ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt

Data usage

It is useful to know how many requests are sent to the server in different scenarios.

All copy commands send the following 4 requests:

/b2api/v1/b2_authorize_account
/b2api/v1/b2_create_bucket
/b2api/v1/b2_list_buckets
/b2api/v1/b2_list_file_names

The b2_list_file_names request will be sent once for every 1k files in the remote path, providing the checksum and modification time of the listed files. As of version 1.33 issue #818 causes extra requests to be sent when using B2 with Crypt. When a copy operation does not require any files to be uploaded, no more requests will be sent.

Uploading files that do not require chunking, will send 2 requests per file upload:

/b2api/v1/b2_get_upload_url
/b2api/v1/b2_upload_file/

Uploading files requiring chunking, will send 2 requests (one each to start and finish the upload) and another 2 requests for each chunk:

/b2api/v1/b2_start_large_file
/b2api/v1/b2_get_upload_part_url
/b2api/v1/b2_upload_part/
/b2api/v1/b2_finish_large_file

B2 with crypt

When using B2 with crypt files are encrypted into a temporary location and streamed from there. This is required to calculate the encrypted file's checksum before beginning the upload. On Windows the %TMPDIR% environment variable is used as the temporary location. If the file requires chunking, both the chunking and encryption will take place in memory.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--b2-chunk-size valuee=SIZE

When uploading large files chunk the file into this size. Note that these chunks are buffered in memory and there might a maximum of --transfers chunks in progress at once. 5,000,000 Bytes is the minimim size (default 96M).

--b2-upload-cutoff=SIZE

Cutoff for switching to chunked upload (default 190.735 MiB == 200 MB). Files above this size will be uploaded in chunks of --b2-chunk-size.

This value should be set no larger than 4.657GiB (== 5GB) as this is the largest file size that can be uploaded.

--b2-test-mode=FLAG

This is for debugging purposes only.

Setting FLAG to one of the strings below will cause b2 to return specific errors for debugging purposes.

• fail_some_uploads
• expire_some_account_authorization_tokens
• force_cap_exceeded

These will be set in the X-Bz-Test-Mode header which is documented in the b2 integrations checklist.

--b2-versions

When set rclone will show and act on older versions of files. For example

Listing without --b2-versions

$ rclone -q ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt

And with

$ rclone -q --b2-versions ls b2:cleanup-test
        9 one.txt
        8 one-v2016-07-04-141032-000.txt
       16 one-v2016-07-04-141003-000.txt
       15 one-v2016-07-02-155621-000.txt

Showing that the current version is unchanged but older versions can be seen. These have the UTC date that they were uploaded to the server to the nearest millisecond appended to them.

Note that when using --b2-versions no file write operations are permitted, so you can't upload files or delete them.

Yandex Disk

Yandex Disk is a cloud storage solution created by Yandex.

Yandex paths may be as deep as required, eg remote:directory/subdirectory.

Here is an example of making a yandex configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
n/s> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 13
Yandex Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id>
Yandex Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret>
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[remote]
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"access_token":"xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx","token_type":"bearer","expiry":"2016-12-29T12:27:11.362788025Z"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

See the remote setup docs for how to set it up on a machine with no Internet browser available.

Note that rclone runs a webserver on your local machine to collect the token as returned from Yandex Disk. This only runs from the moment it opens your browser to the moment you get back the verification code. This is on http://127.0.0.1:53682/ and this it may require you to unblock it temporarily if you are running a host firewall.

Once configured you can then use rclone like this,

See top level directories

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new directory

rclone mkdir remote:directory

List the contents of a directory

rclone ls remote:directory

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote path, deleting any excess files in the path.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:directory

--fast-list

This remote supports --fast-list which allows you to use fewer transactions in exchange for more memory. See the rclone docs for more details.

Modified time

Modified times are supported and are stored accurate to 1 ns in custom metadata called rclone_modified in RFC3339 with nanoseconds format.

MD5 checksums

MD5 checksums are natively supported by Yandex Disk.

SFTP

SFTP is the Secure (or SSH) File Transfer Protocol.

It runs over SSH v2 and is standard with most modern SSH installations.

Paths are specified as remote:path. If the path does not begin with a / it is relative to the home directory of the user. An empty path remote: refers to the users home directory.

Here is an example of making a SFTP configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / FTP Connection
   \ "ftp"
 7 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 8 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 9 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
10 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
11 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
12 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
13 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
14 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
15 / http Connection
   \ "http"
Storage> sftp
SSH host to connect to
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Connect to example.com
   \ "example.com"
host> example.com
SSH username, leave blank for current username, ncw
user> sftpuser
SSH port, leave blank to use default (22)
port> 
SSH password, leave blank to use ssh-agent.
y) Yes type in my own password
g) Generate random password
n) No leave this optional password blank
y/g/n> n
Path to unencrypted PEM-encoded private key file, leave blank to use ssh-agent.
key_file> 
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
host = example.com
user = sftpuser
port = 
pass = 
key_file = 
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all directories in the home directory

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new directory

rclone mkdir remote:path/to/directory

List the contents of a directory

rclone ls remote:path/to/directory

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote directory, deleting any excess files in the directory.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:directory

SSH Authentication

The SFTP remote supports 3 authentication methods

• Password
• Key file
• ssh-agent

Key files should be unencrypted PEM-encoded private key files. For instance /home/$USER/.ssh/id_rsa.

If you don't specify pass or key_file then it will attempt to contact an ssh-agent.

ssh-agent on macOS

Note that there seem to be various problems with using an ssh-agent on macOS due to recent changes in the OS. The most effective work-around seems to be to start an ssh-agent in each session, eg

eval `ssh-agent -s` && ssh-add -A

And then at the end of the session

eval `ssh-agent -k`

These commands can be used in scripts of course.

Modified time

Modified times are stored on the server to 1 second precision.

Modified times are used in syncing and are fully supported.

Limitations

SFTP does not support any checksums.

The only ssh agent supported under Windows is Putty's pagent.

SFTP isn't supported under plan9 until this issue is fixed.

Note that since SFTP isn't HTTP based the following flags don't work with it: --dump-headers, --dump-bodies, --dump-auth

Note that --timeout isn't supported (but --contimeout is).

FTP

FTP is the File Transfer Protocol. FTP support is provided using the github.com/jlaffaye/ftp package.

Here is an example of making an FTP configuration. First run

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process. An FTP remote only needs a host together with and a username and a password. With anonymous FTP server, you will need to use anonymous as username and your email address as the password.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/r/c/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / FTP Connection 
   \ "ftp"
 7 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 8 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 9 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
10 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
11 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
12 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
13 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
14 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> ftp
FTP host to connect to
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Connect to ftp.example.com
   \ "ftp.example.com"
host> ftp.example.com
FTP username, leave blank for current username, ncw
user>
FTP port, leave blank to use default (21)
port>
FTP password
y) Yes type in my own password
g) Generate random password
y/g> y
Enter the password:
password:
Confirm the password:
password:
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
host = ftp.example.com
user = 
port =
pass = *** ENCRYPTED ***
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all directories in the home directory

rclone lsd remote:

Make a new directory

rclone mkdir remote:path/to/directory

List the contents of a directory

rclone ls remote:path/to/directory

Sync /home/local/directory to the remote directory, deleting any excess files in the directory.

rclone sync /home/local/directory remote:directory

Modified time

FTP does not support modified times. Any times you see on the server will be time of upload.

Checksums

FTP does not support any checksums.

Limitations

Note that since FTP isn't HTTP based the following flags don't work with it: --dump-headers, --dump-bodies, --dump-auth

Note that --timeout isn't supported (but --contimeout is).

FTP could support server side move but doesn't yet.

HTTP

The HTTP remote is a read only remote for reading files of a webserver. The webserver should provide file listings which rclone will read and turn into a remote. This has been tested with common webservers such as Apache/Nginx/Caddy and will likely work with file listings from most web servers. (If it doesn't then please file an issue, or send a pull request!)

Paths are specified as remote: or remote:path/to/dir.

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

 rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / FTP Connection
   \ "ftp"
 7 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 8 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 9 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
10 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
11 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
12 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
13 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
14 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
15 / http Connection
   \ "http"
Storage> http
URL of http host to connect to
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Connect to example.com
   \ "https://example.com"
url> https://beta.rclone.org
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
url = https://beta.rclone.org
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y
Current remotes:

Name                 Type
====                 ====
remote               http

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

This remote is called remote and can now be used like this

See all the top level directories

rclone lsd remote:

List the contents of a directory

rclone ls remote:directory

Sync the remote directory to /home/local/directory, deleting any excess files.

rclone sync remote:directory /home/local/directory

Read only

This remote is read only - you can't upload files to an HTTP server.

Modified time

Most HTTP servers store time accurate to 1 second.

Checksum

No checksums are stored.

Usage without a config file

Note that since only two environment variable need to be set, it is easy to use without a config file like this.

RCLONE_CONFIG_ZZ_TYPE=http RCLONE_CONFIG_ZZ_URL=https://beta.rclone.org rclone lsd zz:

Or if you prefer

export RCLONE_CONFIG_ZZ_TYPE=http
export RCLONE_CONFIG_ZZ_URL=https://beta.rclone.org
rclone lsd zz:

Crypt

The crypt remote encrypts and decrypts another remote.

To use it first set up the underlying remote following the config instructions for that remote. You can also use a local pathname instead of a remote which will encrypt and decrypt from that directory which might be useful for encrypting onto a USB stick for example.

First check your chosen remote is working - we'll call it remote:path in these docs. Note that anything inside remote:path will be encrypted and anything outside won't. This means that if you are using a bucket based remote (eg S3, B2, swift) then you should probably put the bucket in the remote s3:bucket. If you just use s3: then rclone will make encrypted bucket names too (if using file name encryption) which may or may not be what you want.

Now configure crypt using rclone config. We will call this one secret to differentiate it from the remote.

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q> n   
name> secret
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / SSH/SFTP Connection
   \ "sftp"
13 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 5
Remote to encrypt/decrypt.
Normally should contain a ':' and a path, eg "myremote:path/to/dir",
"myremote:bucket" or maybe "myremote:" (not recommended).
remote> remote:path
How to encrypt the filenames.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Don't encrypt the file names.  Adds a ".bin" extension only.
   \ "off"
 2 / Encrypt the filenames see the docs for the details.
   \ "standard"
 3 / Very simple filename obfuscation.
   \ "obfuscate"
filename_encryption> 2
Password or pass phrase for encryption.
y) Yes type in my own password
g) Generate random password
y/g> y
Enter the password:
password:
Confirm the password:
password:
Password or pass phrase for salt. Optional but recommended.
Should be different to the previous password.
y) Yes type in my own password
g) Generate random password
n) No leave this optional password blank
y/g/n> g
Password strength in bits.
64 is just about memorable
128 is secure
1024 is the maximum
Bits> 128
Your password is: JAsJvRcgR-_veXNfy_sGmQ
Use this password?
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> y
Remote config
--------------------
[secret]
remote = remote:path
filename_encryption = standard
password = *** ENCRYPTED ***
password2 = *** ENCRYPTED ***
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Important The password is stored in the config file is lightly obscured so it isn't immediately obvious what it is. It is in no way secure unless you use config file encryption.

A long passphrase is recommended, or you can use a random one. Note that if you reconfigure rclone with the same passwords/passphrases elsewhere it will be compatible - all the secrets used are derived from those two passwords/passphrases.

Note that rclone does not encrypt

• file length - this can be calcuated within 16 bytes
• modification time - used for syncing

Specifying the remote

In normal use, make sure the remote has a : in. If you specify the remote without a : then rclone will use a local directory of that name. So if you use a remote of /path/to/secret/files then rclone will encrypt stuff to that directory. If you use a remote of name then rclone will put files in a directory called name in the current directory.

If you specify the remote as remote:path/to/dir then rclone will store encrypted files in path/to/dir on the remote. If you are using file name encryption, then when you save files to secret:subdir/subfile this will store them in the unencrypted path path/to/dir but the subdir/subpath bit will be encrypted.

Note that unless you want encrypted bucket names (which are difficult to manage because you won't know what directory they represent in web interfaces etc), you should probably specify a bucket, eg remote:secretbucket when using bucket based remotes such as S3, Swift, Hubic, B2, GCS.

Example

To test I made a little directory of files using "standard" file name encryption.

plaintext/
├── file0.txt
├── file1.txt
└── subdir
    ├── file2.txt
    ├── file3.txt
    └── subsubdir
        └── file4.txt

Copy these to the remote and list them back

$ rclone -q copy plaintext secret:
$ rclone -q ls secret:
        7 file1.txt
        6 file0.txt
        8 subdir/file2.txt
       10 subdir/subsubdir/file4.txt
        9 subdir/file3.txt

Now see what that looked like when encrypted

$ rclone -q ls remote:path
       55 hagjclgavj2mbiqm6u6cnjjqcg
       54 v05749mltvv1tf4onltun46gls
       57 86vhrsv86mpbtd3a0akjuqslj8/dlj7fkq4kdq72emafg7a7s41uo
       58 86vhrsv86mpbtd3a0akjuqslj8/7uu829995du6o42n32otfhjqp4/b9pausrfansjth5ob3jkdqd4lc
       56 86vhrsv86mpbtd3a0akjuqslj8/8njh1sk437gttmep3p70g81aps

Note that this retains the directory structure which means you can do this

$ rclone -q ls secret:subdir
        8 file2.txt
        9 file3.txt
       10 subsubdir/file4.txt

If don't use file name encryption then the remote will look like this

• note the .bin extensions added to prevent the cloud provider attempting to interpret the data.

$ rclone -q ls remote:path
       54 file0.txt.bin
       57 subdir/file3.txt.bin
       56 subdir/file2.txt.bin
       58 subdir/subsubdir/file4.txt.bin
       55 file1.txt.bin

File name encryption modes

Here are some of the features of the file name encryption modes

Off

• doesn't hide file names or directory structure
• allows for longer file names (~246 characters)
• can use sub paths and copy single files

Standard

• file names encrypted
• file names can't be as long (~156 characters)
• can use sub paths and copy single files
• directory structure visibile
• identical files names will have identical uploaded names
• can use shortcuts to shorten the directory recursion

Obfuscation

This is a simple "rotate" of the filename, with each file having a rot distance based on the filename. We store the distance at the beginning of the filename. So a file called "hello" may become "53.jgnnq"

This is not a strong encryption of filenames, but it may stop automated scanning tools from picking up on filename patterns. As such it's an intermediate between "off" and "standard". The advantage is that it allows for longer path segment names.

There is a possibility with some unicode based filenames that the obfuscation is weak and may map lower case characters to upper case equivalents. You can not rely on this for strong protection.

• file names very lightly obfuscated
• file names can be longer than standard encryption
• can use sub paths and copy single files
• directory structure visibile
• identical files names will have identical uploaded names

Cloud storage systems have various limits on file name length and total path length which you are more likely to hit using "Standard" file name encryption. If you keep your file names to below 156 characters in length then you should be OK on all providers.

There may be an even more secure file name encryption mode in the future which will address the long file name problem.

Modified time and hashes

Crypt stores modification times using the underlying remote so support depends on that.

Hashes are not stored for crypt. However the data integrity is protected by an extremely strong crypto authenticator.

Note that you should use the rclone cryptcheck command to check the integrity of a crypted remote instead of rclone check which can't check the checksums properly.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

--crypt-show-mapping

If this flag is set then for each file that the remote is asked to list, it will log (at level INFO) a line stating the decrypted file name and the encrypted file name.

This is so you can work out which encrypted names are which decrypted names just in case you need to do something with the encrypted file names, or for debugging purposes.

Backing up a crypted remote

If you wish to backup a crypted remote, it it recommended that you use rclone sync on the encrypted files, and make sure the passwords are the same in the new encrypted remote.

This will have the following advantages

• rclone sync will check the checksums while copying
• you can use rclone check between the encrypted remotes
• you don't decrypt and encrypt unecessarily

For example, let's say you have your original remote at remote: with the encrypted version at eremote: with path remote:crypt. You would then set up the new remote remote2: and then the encrypted version eremote2: with path remote2:crypt using the same passwords as eremote:.

To sync the two remotes you would do

rclone sync remote:crypt remote2:crypt

And to check the integrity you would do

rclone check remote:crypt remote2:crypt

File formats

File encryption

Files are encrypted 1:1 source file to destination object. The file has a header and is divided into chunks.

Header

• 8 bytes magic string RCLONE\x00\x00
• 24 bytes Nonce (IV)

The initial nonce is generated from the operating systems crypto strong random number genrator. The nonce is incremented for each chunk read making sure each nonce is unique for each block written. The chance of a nonce being re-used is miniscule. If you wrote an exabyte of data (10¹⁸ bytes) you would have a probability of approximately 2×10⁻³² of re-using a nonce.

Chunk

Each chunk will contain 64kB of data, except for the last one which may have less data. The data chunk is in standard NACL secretbox format. Secretbox uses XSalsa20 and Poly1305 to encrypt and authenticate messages.

Each chunk contains:

• 16 Bytes of Poly1305 authenticator
• 1 - 65536 bytes XSalsa20 encrypted data

64k chunk size was chosen as the best performing chunk size (the authenticator takes too much time below this and the performance drops off due to cache effects above this). Note that these chunks are buffered in memory so they can't be too big.

This uses a 32 byte (256 bit key) key derived from the user password.

Examples

1 byte file will encrypt to

• 32 bytes header
• 17 bytes data chunk

49 bytes total

1MB (1048576 bytes) file will encrypt to

• 32 bytes header
• 16 chunks of 65568 bytes

1049120 bytes total (a 0.05% overhead). This is the overhead for big files.

Name encryption

File names are encrypted segment by segment - the path is broken up into / separated strings and these are encrypted individually.

File segments are padded using using PKCS#7 to a multiple of 16 bytes before encryption.

They are then encrypted with EME using AES with 256 bit key. EME (ECB-Mix-ECB) is a wide-block encryption mode presented in the 2003 paper "A Parallelizable Enciphering Mode" by Halevi and Rogaway.

This makes for determinstic encryption which is what we want - the same filename must encrypt to the same thing otherwise we can't find it on the cloud storage system.

This means that

• filenames with the same name will encrypt the same
• filenames which start the same won't have a common prefix

This uses a 32 byte key (256 bits) and a 16 byte (128 bits) IV both of which are derived from the user password.

After encryption they are written out using a modified version of standard base32 encoding as described in RFC4648. The standard encoding is modified in two ways:

• it becomes lower case (no-one likes upper case filenames!)
• we strip the padding character =

base32 is used rather than the more efficient base64 so rclone can be used on case insensitive remotes (eg Windows, Amazon Drive).

Key derivation

Rclone uses scrypt with parameters N=16384, r=8, p=1 with a an optional user supplied salt (password2) to derive the 32+32+16 = 80 bytes of key material required. If the user doesn't supply a salt then rclone uses an internal one.

scrypt makes it impractical to mount a dictionary attack on rclone encrypted data. For full protection agains this you should always use a salt.

Local Filesystem

Local paths are specified as normal filesystem paths, eg /path/to/wherever, so

rclone sync /home/source /tmp/destination

Will sync /home/source to /tmp/destination

These can be configured into the config file for consistencies sake, but it is probably easier not to.

Modified time

Rclone reads and writes the modified time using an accuracy determined by the OS. Typically this is 1ns on Linux, 10 ns on Windows and 1 Second on OS X.

Filenames

Filenames are expected to be encoded in UTF-8 on disk. This is the normal case for Windows and OS X.

There is a bit more uncertainty in the Linux world, but new distributions will have UTF-8 encoded files names. If you are using an old Linux filesystem with non UTF-8 file names (eg latin1) then you can use the convmv tool to convert the filesystem to UTF-8. This tool is available in most distributions' package managers.

If an invalid (non-UTF8) filename is read, the invalid caracters will be replaced with the unicode replacement character, '<27>'. rclone will emit a debug message in this case (use -v to see), eg

Local file system at .: Replacing invalid UTF-8 characters in "gro\xdf"

Long paths on Windows

Rclone handles long paths automatically, by converting all paths to long UNC paths which allows paths up to 32,767 characters.

This is why you will see that your paths, for instance c:\files is converted to the UNC path \\?\c:\files in the output, and \\server\share is converted to \\?\UNC\server\share.

However, in rare cases this may cause problems with buggy file system drivers like EncFS. To disable UNC conversion globally, add this to your .rclone.conf file:

[local]
nounc = true

If you want to selectively disable UNC, you can add it to a separate entry like this:

[nounc]
type = local
nounc = true

And use rclone like this:

rclone copy c:\src nounc:z:\dst

This will use UNC paths on c:\src but not on z:\dst. Of course this will cause problems if the absolute path length of a file exceeds 258 characters on z, so only use this option if you have to.

Specific options

Here are the command line options specific to local storage

--copy-links, -L

Normally rclone will ignore symlinks or junction points (which behave like symlinks under Windows).

If you supply this flag then rclone will follow the symlink and copy the pointed to file or directory.

This flag applies to all commands.

For example, supposing you have a directory structure like this

$ tree /tmp/a
/tmp/a
├── b -> ../b
├── expected -> ../expected
├── one
└── two
    └── three

Then you can see the difference with and without the flag like this

$ rclone ls /tmp/a
        6 one
        6 two/three

and

$ rclone -L ls /tmp/a
     4174 expected
        6 one
        6 two/three
        6 b/two
        6 b/one

--no-local-unicode-normalization

By default rclone normalizes (NFC) the unicode representation of filenames and directories. This flag disables that normalization and uses the same representation as the local filesystem.

This can be useful if you need to retain the local unicode representation and you are using a cloud provider which supports unnormalized names (e.g. S3 or ACD).

This should also work with any provider if you are using crypt and have file name encryption (the default) or obfuscation turned on.

--one-file-system, -x

This tells rclone to stay in the filesystem specified by the root and not to recurse into different file systems.

For example if you have a directory heirachy like this

root
├── disk1     - disk1 mounted on the root
│   └── file3 - stored on disk1
├── disk2     - disk2 mounted on the root
│   └── file4 - stored on disk12
├── file1     - stored on the root disk
└── file2     - stored on the root disk

Using rclone --one-file-system copy root remote: will only copy file1 and file2. Eg

$ rclone -q --one-file-system ls root
        0 file1
        0 file2

$ rclone -q ls root
        0 disk1/file3
        0 disk2/file4
        0 file1
        0 file2

NB Rclone (like most unix tools such as du, rsync and tar) treats a bind mount to the same device as being on the same filesystem.

NB This flag is only available on Unix based systems. On systems where it isn't supported (eg Windows) it will not appear as an valid flag.

Changelog

• v1.37 - 2017-07-22
  • New backends
    • FTP - thanks to Antonio Messina
    • HTTP - thanks to Vasiliy Tolstov
  • New commands
    • rclone ncdu - for exploring a remote with a text based user interface.
    • rclone lsjson - for listing with a machine readable output
    • rclone dbhashsum - to show Dropbox style hashes of files (local or Dropbox)
  • New Features
    • Implement --fast-list flag
      • This allows remotes to list recursively if they can
      • This uses less transactions (important if you pay for them)
      • This may or may not be quicker
      • This will user more memory as it has to hold the listing in memory
      • --old-sync-method deprecated - the remaining uses are covered by --fast-list
      • This involved a major re-write of all the listing code
    • Add --tpslimit and --tpslimit-burst to limit transactions per second
      • this is useful in conjuction with rclone mount to limit external apps
    • Add --stats-log-level so can see --stats without -v
    • Print password prompts to stderr - Hraban Luyat
    • Warn about duplicate files when syncing
    • Oauth improvements
      • allow auth_url and token_url to be set in the config file
      • Print redirection URI if using own credentials.
    • Don't Mkdir at the start of sync to save transactions
  • Compile
    • Update build to go1.8.3
    • Require go1.6 for building rclone
    • Compile 386 builds with "GO386=387" for maximum compatibility
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fix menu selection when no remotes
    • Config saving reworked to not kill the file if disk gets full
    • Don't delete remote if name does not change while renaming
    • moveto, copyto: report transfers and checks as per move and copy
  • Local
    • Add --local-no-unicode-normalization flag - Bob Potter
  • Mount
    • Now supported on Windows using cgofuse and WinFsp - thanks to Bill Zissimopoulos for much help
    • Compare checksums on upload/download via FUSE
    • Unmount when program ends with SIGINT (Ctrl+C) or SIGTERM - Jérôme Vizcaino
    • On read only open of file, make open pending until first read
    • Make --read-only reject modify operations
    • Implement ModTime via FUSE for remotes that support it
    • Allow modTime to be changed even before all writers are closed
    • Fix panic on renames
    • Fix hang on errored upload
  • Crypt
    • Report the name:root as specified by the user
    • Add an "obfuscate" option for filename encryption - Stephen Harris
  • Amazon Drive
    • Fix initialization order for token renewer
    • Remove revoked credentials, allow oauth proxy config and update docs
  • B2
    • Reduce minimum chunk size to 5MB
  • Drive
    • Add team drive support
    • Reduce bandwidth by adding fields for partial responses - Martin Kristensen
    • Implement --drive-shared-with-me flag to view shared with me files - Danny Tsai
    • Add --drive-trashed-only to read only the files in the trash
    • Remove obsolete --drive-full-list
    • Add missing seek to start on retries of chunked uploads
    • Fix stats accounting for upload
    • Convert / in names to a unicode equivalent (／)
    • Poll for Google Drive changes when mounted
  • OneDrive
    • Fix the uploading of files with spaces
    • Fix initialization order for token renewer
    • Display speeds accurately when uploading - Yoni Jah
    • Swap to using http://localhost:53682/ as redirect URL - Michael Ledin
    • Retry on token expired error, reset upload body on retry - Yoni Jah
  • Google Cloud Storage
    • Add ability to specify location and storage class via config and command line - thanks gdm85
    • Create container if necessary on server side copy
    • Increase directory listing chunk to 1000 to increase performance
    • Obtain a refresh token for GCS - Steven Lu
  • Yandex
    • Fix the name reported in log messages (was empty)
    • Correct error return for listing empty directory
  • Dropbox
    • Rewritten to use the v2 API
      • Now supports ModTime
        • Can only set by uploading the file again
        • If you uploaded with an old rclone, rclone may upload everything again
        • Use --size-only or --checksum to avoid this
      • Now supports the Dropbox content hashing scheme
      • Now supports low level retries
  • S3
    • Work around eventual consistency in bucket creation
    • Create container if necessary on server side copy
    • Add us-east-2 (Ohio) and eu-west-2 (London) S3 regions - Zahiar Ahmed
  • Swift, Hubic
    • Fix zero length directory markers showing in the subdirectory listing
      • this caused lots of duplicate transfers
    • Fix paged directory listings
      • this caused duplicate directory errors
    • Create container if necessary on server side copy
    • Increase directory listing chunk to 1000 to increase performance
    • Make sensible error if the user forgets the container
  • SFTP
    • Add support for using ssh key files
    • Fix under Windows
    • Fix ssh agent on Windows
    • Adapt to latest version of library - Igor Kharin
• v1.36 - 2017-03-18
  • New Features
    • SFTP remote (Jack Schmidt)
    • Re-implement sync routine to work a directory at a time reducing memory usage
    • Logging revamped to be more inline with rsync - now much quieter
      • -v only shows transfers
      • -vv is for full debug
      • --syslog to log to syslog on capable platforms
    • Implement --backup-dir and --suffix
    • Implement --track-renames (initial implementation by Bjørn Erik Pedersen)
    • Add time-based bandwidth limits (Lukas Loesche)
    • rclone cryptcheck: checks integrity of crypt remotes
    • Allow all config file variables and options to be set from environment variables
    • Add --buffer-size parameter to control buffer size for copy
    • Make --delete-after the default
    • Add --ignore-checksum flag (fixed by Hisham Zarka)
    • rclone check: Add --download flag to check all the data, not just hashes
    • rclone cat: add --head, --tail, --offset, --count and --discard
    • rclone config: when choosing from a list, allow the value to be entered too
    • rclone config: allow rename and copy of remotes
    • rclone obscure: for generating encrypted passwords for rclone's config (T.C. Ferguson)
    • Comply with XDG Base Directory specification (Dario Giovannetti)
      • this moves the default location of the config file in a backwards compatible way
    • Release changes
      • Ubuntu snap support (Dedsec1)
      • Compile with go 1.8
      • MIPS/Linux big and little endian support
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fix copyto copying things to the wrong place if the destination dir didn't exist
    • Fix parsing of remotes in moveto and copyto
    • Fix --delete-before deleting files on copy
    • Fix --files-from with an empty file copying everything
    • Fix sync: don't update mod times if --dry-run set
    • Fix MimeType propagation
    • Fix filters to add ** rules to directory rules
  • Local
    • Implement -L, --copy-links flag to allow rclone to follow symlinks
    • Open files in write only mode so rclone can write to an rclone mount
    • Fix unnormalised unicode causing problems reading directories
    • Fix interaction between -x flag and --max-depth
  • Mount
    • Implement proper directory handling (mkdir, rmdir, renaming)
    • Make include and exclude filters apply to mount
    • Implement read and write async buffers - control with --buffer-size
    • Fix fsync on for directories
    • Fix retry on network failure when reading off crypt
  • Crypt
    • Add --crypt-show-mapping to show encrypted file mapping
    • Fix crypt writer getting stuck in a loop
      • IMPORTANT this bug had the potential to cause data corruption when
        • reading data from a network based remote and
        • writing to a crypt on Google Drive
      • Use the cryptcheck command to validate your data if you are concerned
      • If syncing two crypt remotes, sync the unencrypted remote
  • Amazon Drive
    • Fix panics on Move (rename)
    • Fix panic on token expiry
  • B2
    • Fix inconsistent listings and rclone check
    • Fix uploading empty files with go1.8
    • Constrain memory usage when doing multipart uploads
    • Fix upload url not being refreshed properly
  • Drive
    • Fix Rmdir on directories with trashed files
    • Fix "Ignoring unknown object" when downloading
    • Add --drive-list-chunk
    • Add --drive-skip-gdocs (Károly Oláh)
  • OneDrive
    • Implement Move
    • Fix Copy
      • Fix overwrite detection in Copy
      • Fix waitForJob to parse errors correctly
    • Use token renewer to stop auth errors on long uploads
    • Fix uploading empty files with go1.8
  • Google Cloud Storage
    • Fix depth 1 directory listings
  • Yandex
    • Fix single level directory listing
  • Dropbox
    • Normalise the case for single level directory listings
    • Fix depth 1 listing
  • S3
    • Added ca-central-1 region (Jon Yergatian)
• v1.35 - 2017-01-02
  • New Features
    • moveto and copyto commands for choosing a destination name on copy/move
    • rmdirs command to recursively delete empty directories
    • Allow repeated --include/--exclude/--filter options
    • Only show transfer stats on commands which transfer stuff
      • show stats on any command using the --stats flag
    • Allow overlapping directories in move when server side dir move is supported
    • Add --stats-unit option - thanks Scott McGillivray
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fix the config file being overwritten when two rclones are running
    • Make rclone lsd obey the filters properly
    • Fix compilation on mips
    • Fix not transferring files that don't differ in size
    • Fix panic on nil retry/fatal error
  • Mount
    • Retry reads on error - should help with reliability a lot
    • Report the modification times for directories from the remote
    • Add bandwidth accounting and limiting (fixes --bwlimit)
    • If --stats provided will show stats and which files are transferring
    • Support R/W files if truncate is set.
    • Implement statfs interface so df works
    • Note that write is now supported on Amazon Drive
    • Report number of blocks in a file - thanks Stefan Breunig
  • Crypt
    • Prevent the user pointing crypt at itself
    • Fix failed to authenticate decrypted block errors
      • these will now return the underlying unexpected EOF instead
  • Amazon Drive
    • Add support for server side move and directory move - thanks Stefan Breunig
    • Fix nil pointer deref on size attribute
  • B2
    • Use new prefix and delimiter parameters in directory listings
      • This makes --max-depth 1 dir listings as used in mount much faster
    • Reauth the account while doing uploads too - should help with token expiry
  • Drive
    • Make DirMove more efficient and complain about moving the root
    • Create destination directory on Move()
• v1.34 - 2016-11-06
  • New Features
    • Stop single file and --files-from operations iterating through the source bucket.
    • Stop removing failed upload to cloud storage remotes
    • Make ContentType be preserved for cloud to cloud copies
    • Add support to toggle bandwidth limits via SIGUSR2 - thanks Marco Paganini
    • rclone check shows count of hashes that couldn't be checked
    • rclone listremotes command
    • Support linux/arm64 build - thanks Fredrik Fornwall
    • Remove Authorization: lines from --dump-headers output
  • Bug Fixes
    • Ignore files with control characters in the names
    • Fix rclone move command
      • Delete src files which already existed in dst
      • Fix deletion of src file when dst file older
    • Fix rclone check on crypted file systems
    • Make failed uploads not count as "Transferred"
    • Make sure high level retries show with -q
    • Use a vendor directory with godep for repeatable builds
  • rclone mount - FUSE
    • Implement FUSE mount options
      • --no-modtime, --debug-fuse, --read-only, --allow-non-empty, --allow-root, --allow-other
      • --default-permissions, --write-back-cache, --max-read-ahead, --umask, --uid, --gid
    • Add --dir-cache-time to control caching of directory entries
    • Implement seek for files opened for read (useful for video players)
      • with -no-seek flag to disable
    • Fix crash on 32 bit ARM (alignment of 64 bit counter)
    • ...and many more internal fixes and improvements!
  • Crypt
    • Don't show encrypted password in configurator to stop confusion
  • Amazon Drive
    • New wait for upload option --acd-upload-wait-per-gb
      • upload timeouts scale by file size and can be disabled
    • Add 502 Bad Gateway to list of errors we retry
    • Fix overwriting a file with a zero length file
    • Fix ACD file size warning limit - thanks Felix Bünemann
  • Local
    • Unix: implement -x/--one-file-system to stay on a single file system
      • thanks Durval Menezes and Luiz Carlos Rumbelsperger Viana
    • Windows: ignore the symlink bit on files
    • Windows: Ignore directory based junction points
  • B2
    • Make sure each upload has at least one upload slot - fixes strange upload stats
    • Fix uploads when using crypt
    • Fix download of large files (sha1 mismatch)
    • Return error when we try to create a bucket which someone else owns
    • Update B2 docs with Data usage, and Crypt section - thanks Tomasz Mazur
  • S3
    • Command line and config file support for
      • Setting/overriding ACL - thanks Radek Senfeld
      • Setting storage class - thanks Asko Tamm
  • Drive
    • Make exponential backoff work exactly as per Google specification
    • add .epub, .odp and .tsv as export formats.
  • Swift
    • Don't read metadata for directory marker objects
• v1.33 - 2016-08-24
  • New Features
    • Implement encryption
      • data encrypted in NACL secretbox format
      • with optional file name encryption
    • New commands
      • rclone mount - implements FUSE mounting of remotes (EXPERIMENTAL)
        • works on Linux, FreeBSD and OS X (need testers for the last 2!)
      • rclone cat - outputs remote file or files to the terminal
      • rclone genautocomplete - command to make a bash completion script for rclone
    • Editing a remote using rclone config now goes through the wizard
    • Compile with go 1.7 - this fixes rclone on macOS Sierra and on 386 processors
    • Use cobra for sub commands and docs generation
  • drive
    • Document how to make your own client_id
  • s3
    • User-configurable Amazon S3 ACL (thanks Radek Šenfeld)
  • b2
    • Fix stats accounting for upload - no more jumping to 100% done
    • On cleanup delete hide marker if it is the current file
    • New B2 API endpoint (thanks Per Cederberg)
    • Set maximum backoff to 5 Minutes
  • onedrive
    • Fix URL escaping in file names - eg uploading files with + in them.
  • amazon cloud drive
    • Fix token expiry during large uploads
    • Work around 408 REQUEST_TIMEOUT and 504 GATEWAY_TIMEOUT errors
  • local
    • Fix filenames with invalid UTF-8 not being uploaded
    • Fix problem with some UTF-8 characters on OS X
• v1.32 - 2016-07-13
  • Backblaze B2
    • Fix upload of files large files not in root
• v1.31 - 2016-07-13
  • New Features
    • Reduce memory on sync by about 50%
    • Implement --no-traverse flag to stop copy traversing the destination remote.
      • This can be used to reduce memory usage down to the smallest possible.
      • Useful to copy a small number of files into a large destination folder.
    • Implement cleanup command for emptying trash / removing old versions of files
      • Currently B2 only
    • Single file handling improved
      • Now copied with --files-from
      • Automatically sets --no-traverse when copying a single file
    • Info on using installing with ansible - thanks Stefan Weichinger
    • Implement --no-update-modtime flag to stop rclone fixing the remote modified times.
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fix move command - stop it running for overlapping Fses - this was causing data loss.
  • Local
    • Fix incomplete hashes - this was causing problems for B2.
  • Amazon Drive
    • Rename Amazon Cloud Drive to Amazon Drive - no changes to config file needed.
  • Swift
    • Add support for non-default project domain - thanks Antonio Messina.
  • S3
    • Add instructions on how to use rclone with minio.
    • Add ap-northeast-2 (Seoul) and ap-south-1 (Mumbai) regions.
    • Skip setting the modified time for objects > 5GB as it isn't possible.
  • Backblaze B2
    • Add --b2-versions flag so old versions can be listed and retreived.
    • Treat 403 errors (eg cap exceeded) as fatal.
    • Implement cleanup command for deleting old file versions.
    • Make error handling compliant with B2 integrations notes.
    • Fix handling of token expiry.
    • Implement --b2-test-mode to set X-Bz-Test-Mode header.
    • Set cutoff for chunked upload to 200MB as per B2 guidelines.
    • Make upload multi-threaded.
  • Dropbox
    • Don't retry 461 errors.
• v1.30 - 2016-06-18
  • New Features
    • Directory listing code reworked for more features and better error reporting (thanks to Klaus Post for help). This enables
      • Directory include filtering for efficiency
      • --max-depth parameter
      • Better error reporting
      • More to come
    • Retry more errors
    • Add --ignore-size flag - for uploading images to onedrive
    • Log -v output to stdout by default
    • Display the transfer stats in more human readable form
    • Make 0 size files specifiable with --max-size 0b
    • Add b suffix so we can specify bytes in --bwlimit, --min-size etc
    • Use "password:" instead of "password>" prompt - thanks Klaus Post and Leigh Klotz
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fix retry doing one too many retries
  • Local
    • Fix problems with OS X and UTF-8 characters
  • Amazon Drive
    • Check a file exists before uploading to help with 408 Conflict errors
    • Reauth on 401 errors - this has been causing a lot of problems
    • Work around spurious 403 errors
    • Restart directory listings on error
  • Google Drive
    • Check a file exists before uploading to help with duplicates
    • Fix retry of multipart uploads
  • Backblaze B2
    • Implement large file uploading
  • S3
    • Add AES256 server-side encryption for - thanks Justin R. Wilson
  • Google Cloud Storage
    • Make sure we don't use conflicting content types on upload
    • Add service account support - thanks Michal Witkowski
  • Swift
    • Add auth version parameter
    • Add domain option for openstack (v3 auth) - thanks Fabian Ruff
• v1.29 - 2016-04-18
  • New Features
    • Implement -I, --ignore-times for unconditional upload
    • Improve dedupecommand
      • Now removes identical copies without asking
      • Now obeys --dry-run
      • Implement --dedupe-mode for non interactive running
        • --dedupe-mode interactive - interactive the default.
        • --dedupe-mode skip - removes identical files then skips anything left.
        • --dedupe-mode first - removes identical files then keeps the first one.
        • --dedupe-mode newest - removes identical files then keeps the newest one.
        • --dedupe-mode oldest - removes identical files then keeps the oldest one.
        • --dedupe-mode rename - removes identical files then renames the rest to be different.
  • Bug fixes
    • Make rclone check obey the --size-only flag.
    • Use "application/octet-stream" if discovered mime type is invalid.
    • Fix missing "quit" option when there are no remotes.
  • Google Drive
    • Increase default chunk size to 8 MB - increases upload speed of big files
    • Speed up directory listings and make more reliable
    • Add missing retries for Move and DirMove - increases reliability
    • Preserve mime type on file update
  • Backblaze B2
    • Enable mod time syncing
      • This means that B2 will now check modification times
      • It will upload new files to update the modification times
      • (there isn't an API to just set the mod time.)
      • If you want the old behaviour use --size-only.
    • Update API to new version
    • Fix parsing of mod time when not in metadata
  • Swift/Hubic
    • Don't return an MD5SUM for static large objects
  • S3
    • Fix uploading files bigger than 50GB
• v1.28 - 2016-03-01
  • New Features
    • Configuration file encryption - thanks Klaus Post
    • Improve rclone config adding more help and making it easier to understand
    • Implement -u/--update so creation times can be used on all remotes
    • Implement --low-level-retries flag
    • Optionally disable gzip compression on downloads with --no-gzip-encoding
  • Bug fixes
    • Don't make directories if --dry-run set
    • Fix and document the move command
    • Fix redirecting stderr on unix-like OSes when using --log-file
    • Fix delete command to wait until all finished - fixes missing deletes.
  • Backblaze B2
    • Use one upload URL per go routine fixes more than one upload using auth token
    • Add pacing, retries and reauthentication - fixes token expiry problems
    • Upload without using a temporary file from local (and remotes which support SHA1)
    • Fix reading metadata for all files when it shouldn't have been
  • Drive
    • Fix listing drive documents at root
    • Disable copy and move for Google docs
  • Swift
    • Fix uploading of chunked files with non ASCII characters
    • Allow setting of storage_url in the config - thanks Xavier Lucas
  • S3
    • Allow IAM role and credentials from environment variables - thanks Brian Stengaard
    • Allow low privilege users to use S3 (check if directory exists during Mkdir) - thanks Jakub Gedeon
  • Amazon Drive
    • Retry on more things to make directory listings more reliable
• v1.27 - 2016-01-31
  • New Features
    • Easier headless configuration with rclone authorize
    • Add support for multiple hash types - we now check SHA1 as well as MD5 hashes.
    • delete command which does obey the filters (unlike purge)
    • dedupe command to deduplicate a remote. Useful with Google Drive.
    • Add --ignore-existing flag to skip all files that exist on destination.
    • Add --delete-before, --delete-during, --delete-after flags.
    • Add --memprofile flag to debug memory use.
    • Warn the user about files with same name but different case
    • Make --include rules add their implict exclude * at the end of the filter list
    • Deprecate compiling with go1.3
  • Amazon Drive
    • Fix download of files > 10 GB
    • Fix directory traversal ("Next token is expired") for large directory listings
    • Remove 409 conflict from error codes we will retry - stops very long pauses
  • Backblaze B2
    • SHA1 hashes now checked by rclone core
  • Drive
    • Add --drive-auth-owner-only to only consider files owned by the user - thanks Björn Harrtell
    • Export Google documents
  • Dropbox
    • Make file exclusion error controllable with -q
  • Swift
    • Fix upload from unprivileged user.
  • S3
    • Fix updating of mod times of files with + in.
  • Local
    • Add local file system option to disable UNC on Windows.
• v1.26 - 2016-01-02
  • New Features
    • Yandex storage backend - thank you Dmitry Burdeev ("dibu")
    • Implement Backblaze B2 storage backend
    • Add --min-age and --max-age flags - thank you Adriano Aurélio Meirelles
    • Make ls/lsl/md5sum/size/check obey includes and excludes
  • Fixes
    • Fix crash in http logging
    • Upload releases to github too
  • Swift
    • Fix sync for chunked files
  • OneDrive
    • Re-enable server side copy
    • Don't mask HTTP error codes with JSON decode error
  • S3
    • Fix corrupting Content-Type on mod time update (thanks Joseph Spurrier)
• v1.25 - 2015-11-14
  • New features
    • Implement Hubic storage system
  • Fixes
    • Fix deletion of some excluded files without --delete-excluded
      • This could have deleted files unexpectedly on sync
      • Always check first with --dry-run!
  • Swift
    • Stop SetModTime losing metadata (eg X-Object-Manifest)
      • This could have caused data loss for files > 5GB in size
    • Use ContentType from Object to avoid lookups in listings
  • OneDrive
    • disable server side copy as it seems to be broken at Microsoft
• v1.24 - 2015-11-07
  • New features
    • Add support for Microsoft OneDrive
    • Add --no-check-certificate option to disable server certificate verification
    • Add async readahead buffer for faster transfer of big files
  • Fixes
    • Allow spaces in remotes and check remote names for validity at creation time
    • Allow '&' and disallow ':' in Windows filenames.
  • Swift
    • Ignore directory marker objects where appropriate - allows working with Hubic
    • Don't delete the container if fs wasn't at root
  • S3
    • Don't delete the bucket if fs wasn't at root
  • Google Cloud Storage
    • Don't delete the bucket if fs wasn't at root
• v1.23 - 2015-10-03
  • New features
    • Implement rclone size for measuring remotes
  • Fixes
    • Fix headless config for drive and gcs
    • Tell the user they should try again if the webserver method failed
    • Improve output of --dump-headers
  • S3
    • Allow anonymous access to public buckets
  • Swift
    • Stop chunked operations logging "Failed to read info: Object Not Found"
    • Use Content-Length on uploads for extra reliability
• v1.22 - 2015-09-28
  • Implement rsync like include and exclude flags
  • swift
    • Support files > 5GB - thanks Sergey Tolmachev
• v1.21 - 2015-09-22
  • New features
    • Display individual transfer progress
    • Make lsl output times in localtime
  • Fixes
    • Fix allowing user to override credentials again in Drive, GCS and ACD
  • Amazon Drive
    • Implement compliant pacing scheme
  • Google Drive
    • Make directory reads concurrent for increased speed.
• v1.20 - 2015-09-15
  • New features
    • Amazon Drive support
    • Oauth support redone - fix many bugs and improve usability
      • Use "golang.org/x/oauth2" as oauth libary of choice
      • Improve oauth usability for smoother initial signup
      • drive, googlecloudstorage: optionally use auto config for the oauth token
    • Implement --dump-headers and --dump-bodies debug flags
    • Show multiple matched commands if abbreviation too short
    • Implement server side move where possible
  • local
    • Always use UNC paths internally on Windows - fixes a lot of bugs
  • dropbox
    • force use of our custom transport which makes timeouts work
  • Thanks to Klaus Post for lots of help with this release
• v1.19 - 2015-08-28
  • New features
    • Server side copies for s3/swift/drive/dropbox/gcs
    • Move command - uses server side copies if it can
    • Implement --retries flag - tries 3 times by default
    • Build for plan9/amd64 and solaris/amd64 too
  • Fixes
    • Make a current version download with a fixed URL for scripting
    • Ignore rmdir in limited fs rather than throwing error
  • dropbox
    • Increase chunk size to improve upload speeds massively
    • Issue an error message when trying to upload bad file name
• v1.18 - 2015-08-17
  • drive
    • Add --drive-use-trash flag so rclone trashes instead of deletes
    • Add "Forbidden to download" message for files with no downloadURL
  • dropbox
    • Remove datastore
      • This was deprecated and it caused a lot of problems
      • Modification times and MD5SUMs no longer stored
    • Fix uploading files > 2GB
  • s3
    • use official AWS SDK from github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go
    • NB will most likely require you to delete and recreate remote
    • enable multipart upload which enables files > 5GB
    • tested with Ceph / RadosGW / S3 emulation
    • many thanks to Sam Liston and Brian Haymore at the Utah Center for High Performance Computing for a Ceph test account
  • misc
    • Show errors when reading the config file
    • Do not print stats in quiet mode - thanks Leonid Shalupov
    • Add FAQ
    • Fix created directories not obeying umask
    • Linux installation instructions - thanks Shimon Doodkin
• v1.17 - 2015-06-14
  • dropbox: fix case insensitivity issues - thanks Leonid Shalupov
• v1.16 - 2015-06-09
  • Fix uploading big files which was causing timeouts or panics
  • Don't check md5sum after download with --size-only
• v1.15 - 2015-06-06
  • Add --checksum flag to only discard transfers by MD5SUM - thanks Alex Couper
  • Implement --size-only flag to sync on size not checksum & modtime
  • Expand docs and remove duplicated information
  • Document rclone's limitations with directories
  • dropbox: update docs about case insensitivity
• v1.14 - 2015-05-21
  • local: fix encoding of non utf-8 file names - fixes a duplicate file problem
  • drive: docs about rate limiting
  • google cloud storage: Fix compile after API change in "google.golang.org/api/storage/v1"
• v1.13 - 2015-05-10
  • Revise documentation (especially sync)
  • Implement --timeout and --conntimeout
  • s3: ignore etags from multipart uploads which aren't md5sums
• v1.12 - 2015-03-15
  • drive: Use chunked upload for files above a certain size
  • drive: add --drive-chunk-size and --drive-upload-cutoff parameters
  • drive: switch to insert from update when a failed copy deletes the upload
  • core: Log duplicate files if they are detected
• v1.11 - 2015-03-04
  • swift: add region parameter
  • drive: fix crash on failed to update remote mtime
  • In remote paths, change native directory separators to /
  • Add synchronization to ls/lsl/lsd output to stop corruptions
  • Ensure all stats/log messages to go stderr
  • Add --log-file flag to log everything (including panics) to file
  • Make it possible to disable stats printing with --stats=0
  • Implement --bwlimit to limit data transfer bandwidth
• v1.10 - 2015-02-12
  • s3: list an unlimited number of items
  • Fix getting stuck in the configurator
• v1.09 - 2015-02-07
  • windows: Stop drive letters (eg C:) getting mixed up with remotes (eg drive:)
  • local: Fix directory separators on Windows
  • drive: fix rate limit exceeded errors
• v1.08 - 2015-02-04
  • drive: fix subdirectory listing to not list entire drive
  • drive: Fix SetModTime
  • dropbox: adapt code to recent library changes
• v1.07 - 2014-12-23
  • google cloud storage: fix memory leak
• v1.06 - 2014-12-12
  • Fix "Couldn't find home directory" on OSX
  • swift: Add tenant parameter
  • Use new location of Google API packages
• v1.05 - 2014-08-09
  • Improved tests and consequently lots of minor fixes
  • core: Fix race detected by go race detector
  • core: Fixes after running errcheck
  • drive: reset root directory on Rmdir and Purge
  • fs: Document that Purger returns error on empty directory, test and fix
  • google cloud storage: fix ListDir on subdirectory
  • google cloud storage: re-read metadata in SetModTime
  • s3: make reading metadata more reliable to work around eventual consistency problems
  • s3: strip trailing / from ListDir()
  • swift: return directories without / in ListDir
• v1.04 - 2014-07-21
  • google cloud storage: Fix crash on Update
• v1.03 - 2014-07-20
  • swift, s3, dropbox: fix updated files being marked as corrupted
  • Make compile with go 1.1 again
• v1.02 - 2014-07-19
  • Implement Dropbox remote
  • Implement Google Cloud Storage remote
  • Verify Md5sums and Sizes after copies
  • Remove times from "ls" command - lists sizes only
  • Add add "lsl" - lists times and sizes
  • Add "md5sum" command
• v1.01 - 2014-07-04
  • drive: fix transfer of big files using up lots of memory
• v1.00 - 2014-07-03
  • drive: fix whole second dates
• v0.99 - 2014-06-26
  • Fix --dry-run not working
  • Make compatible with go 1.1
• v0.98 - 2014-05-30
  • s3: Treat missing Content-Length as 0 for some ceph installations
  • rclonetest: add file with a space in
• v0.97 - 2014-05-05
  • Implement copying of single files
  • s3 & swift: support paths inside containers/buckets
• v0.96 - 2014-04-24
  • drive: Fix multiple files of same name being created
  • drive: Use o.Update and fs.Put to optimise transfers
  • Add version number, -V and --version
• v0.95 - 2014-03-28
  • rclone.org: website, docs and graphics
  • drive: fix path parsing
• v0.94 - 2014-03-27
  • Change remote format one last time
  • GNU style flags
• v0.93 - 2014-03-16
  • drive: store token in config file
  • cross compile other versions
  • set strict permissions on config file
• v0.92 - 2014-03-15
  • Config fixes and --config option
• v0.91 - 2014-03-15
  • Make config file
• v0.90 - 2013-06-27
  • Project named rclone
• v0.00 - 2012-11-18
  • Project started

Bugs and Limitations

Empty directories are left behind / not created

With remotes that have a concept of directory, eg Local and Drive, empty directories may be left behind, or not created when one was expected.

This is because rclone doesn't have a concept of a directory - it only works on objects. Most of the object storage systems can't actually store a directory so there is nowhere for rclone to store anything about directories.

You can work round this to some extent with thepurge command which will delete everything under the path, inluding empty directories.

This may be fixed at some point in Issue #100

Directory timestamps aren't preserved

For the same reason as the above, rclone doesn't have a concept of a directory - it only works on objects, therefore it can't preserve the timestamps of directories.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do all cloud storage systems support all rclone commands

Yes they do. All the rclone commands (eg sync, copy etc) will work on all the remote storage systems.

Can I copy the config from one machine to another

Sure! Rclone stores all of its config in a single file. If you want to find this file, the simplest way is to run rclone -h and look at the help for the --config flag which will tell you where it is.

See the remote setup docs for more info.

How do I configure rclone on a remote / headless box with no browser?

This has now been documented in its own remote setup page.

Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3

Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.

Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth.

The syncs would be incremental (on a file by file basis).

Eg

rclone sync drive:Folder s3:bucket

Using rclone from multiple locations at the same time

You can use rclone from multiple places at the same time if you choose different subdirectory for the output, eg

Server A> rclone sync /tmp/whatever remote:ServerA
Server B> rclone sync /tmp/whatever remote:ServerB

If you sync to the same directory then you should use rclone copy otherwise the two rclones may delete each others files, eg

Server A> rclone copy /tmp/whatever remote:Backup
Server B> rclone copy /tmp/whatever remote:Backup

The file names you upload from Server A and Server B should be different in this case, otherwise some file systems (eg Drive) may make duplicates.

Why doesn't rclone support partial transfers / binary diffs like rsync?

Rclone stores each file you transfer as a native object on the remote cloud storage system. This means that you can see the files you upload as expected using alternative access methods (eg using the Google Drive web interface). There is a 1:1 mapping between files on your hard disk and objects created in the cloud storage system.

Cloud storage systems (at least none I've come across yet) don't support partially uploading an object. You can't take an existing object, and change some bytes in the middle of it.

It would be possible to make a sync system which stored binary diffs instead of whole objects like rclone does, but that would break the 1:1 mapping of files on your hard disk to objects in the remote cloud storage system.

All the cloud storage systems support partial downloads of content, so it would be possible to make partial downloads work. However to make this work efficiently this would require storing a significant amount of metadata, which breaks the desired 1:1 mapping of files to objects.

Can rclone do bi-directional sync?

No, not at present. rclone only does uni-directional sync from A -> B. It may do in the future though since it has all the primitives - it just requires writing the algorithm to do it.

Can I use rclone with an HTTP proxy?

Yes. rclone will use the environment variables HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY, similar to cURL and other programs.

HTTPS_PROXY takes precedence over HTTP_PROXY for https requests.

The environment values may be either a complete URL or a "host[:port]", in which case the "http" scheme is assumed.

The NO_PROXY allows you to disable the proxy for specific hosts. Hosts must be comma separated, and can contain domains or parts. For instance "foo.com" also matches "bar.foo.com".

Rclone gives x509: failed to load system roots and no roots provided error

This means that rclone can't file the SSL root certificates. Likely you are running rclone on a NAS with a cut-down Linux OS, or possibly on Solaris.

Rclone (via the Go runtime) tries to load the root certificates from these places on Linux.

"/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt", // Debian/Ubuntu/Gentoo etc.
"/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt",   // Fedora/RHEL
"/etc/ssl/ca-bundle.pem",             // OpenSUSE
"/etc/pki/tls/cacert.pem",            // OpenELEC

So doing something like this should fix the problem. It also sets the time which is important for SSL to work properly.

mkdir -p /etc/ssl/certs/
curl -o /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bagder/ca-bundle/master/ca-bundle.crt
ntpclient -s -h pool.ntp.org

Note that you may need to add the --insecure option to the curl command line if it doesn't work without.

curl --insecure -o /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bagder/ca-bundle/master/ca-bundle.crt

Rclone gives Failed to load config file: function not implemented error

Likely this means that you are running rclone on Linux version not supported by the go runtime, ie earlier than version 2.6.23.

See the system requirements section in the go install docs for full details.

All my uploaded docx/xlsx/pptx files appear as archive/zip

This is caused by uploading these files from a Windows computer which hasn't got the Microsoft Office suite installed. The easiest way to fix is to install the Word viewer and the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 and later versions' file formats

License

This is free software under the terms of MIT the license (check the COPYING file included with the source code).

Copyright (C) 2012 by Nick Craig-Wood https://www.craig-wood.com/nick/

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Authors

• Nick Craig-Wood nick@craig-wood.com

Contributors

• Alex Couper amcouper@gmail.com
• Leonid Shalupov leonid@shalupov.com shalupov@diverse.org.ru
• Shimon Doodkin helpmepro1@gmail.com
• Colin Nicholson colin@colinn.com
• Klaus Post klauspost@gmail.com
• Sergey Tolmachev tolsi.ru@gmail.com
• Adriano Aurélio Meirelles adriano@atinge.com
• C. Bess cbess@users.noreply.github.com
• Dmitry Burdeev dibu28@gmail.com
• Joseph Spurrier github@josephspurrier.com
• Björn Harrtell bjorn@wololo.org
• Xavier Lucas xavier.lucas@corp.ovh.com
• Werner Beroux werner@beroux.com
• Brian Stengaard brian@stengaard.eu
• Jakub Gedeon jgedeon@sofi.com
• Jim Tittsler jwt@onjapan.net
• Michal Witkowski michal@improbable.io
• Fabian Ruff fabian.ruff@sap.com
• Leigh Klotz klotz@quixey.com
• Romain Lapray lapray.romain@gmail.com
• Justin R. Wilson jrw972@gmail.com
• Antonio Messina antonio.s.messina@gmail.com
• Stefan G. Weichinger office@oops.co.at
• Per Cederberg cederberg@gmail.com
• Radek Šenfeld rush@logic.cz
• Fredrik Fornwall fredrik@fornwall.net
• Asko Tamm asko@deekit.net
• xor-zz xor@gstocco.com
• Tomasz Mazur tmazur90@gmail.com
• Marco Paganini paganini@paganini.net
• Felix Bünemann buenemann@louis.info
• Durval Menezes jmrclone@durval.com
• Luiz Carlos Rumbelsperger Viana maxd13_luiz_carlos@hotmail.com
• Stefan Breunig stefan-github@yrden.de
• Alishan Ladhani ali-l@users.noreply.github.com
• 0xJAKE 0xJAKE@users.noreply.github.com
• Thibault Molleman thibaultmol@users.noreply.github.com
• Scott McGillivray scott.mcgillivray@gmail.com
• Bjørn Erik Pedersen bjorn.erik.pedersen@gmail.com
• Lukas Loesche lukas@mesosphere.io
• emyarod allllaboutyou@gmail.com
• T.C. Ferguson tcf909@gmail.com
• Brandur brandur@mutelight.org
• Dario Giovannetti dev@dariogiovannetti.net
• Károly Oláh okaresz@aol.com
• Jon Yergatian jon@macfanatic.ca
• Jack Schmidt github@mowsey.org
• Dedsec1 Dedsec1@users.noreply.github.com
• Hisham Zarka hzarka@gmail.com
• Jérôme Vizcaino jerome.vizcaino@gmail.com
• Mike Tesch mjt6129@rit.edu
• Marvin Watson marvwatson@users.noreply.github.com
• Danny Tsai danny8376@gmail.com
• Yoni Jah yonjah+git@gmail.com yonjah+github@gmail.com
• Stephen Harris github@spuddy.org
• Ihor Dvoretskyi ihor.dvoretskyi@gmail.com
• Jon Craton jncraton@gmail.com
• Hraban Luyat hraban@0brg.net
• Michael Ledin mledin89@gmail.com
• Martin Kristensen me@azgul.com
• Too Much IO toomuchio@users.noreply.github.com
• Anisse Astier anisse@astier.eu
• Zahiar Ahmed zahiar@live.com
• Igor Kharin igorkharin@gmail.com
• Bill Zissimopoulos billziss@navimatics.com
• Bob Potter bobby.potter@gmail.com
• Steven Lu tacticalazn@gmail.com
• Sjur Fredriksen sjurtf@ifi.uio.no
• Ruwbin hubus12345@gmail.com
• Fabian Möller fabianm88@gmail.com
• Edward Q. Bridges github@eqbridges.com
• Vasiliy Tolstov v.tolstov@selfip.ru
• Harshavardhana harsha@minio.io
• sainaen sainaen@gmail.com
• gdm85 gdm85@users.noreply.github.com
• Yaroslav Halchenko debian@onerussian.com

Contact the rclone project

Forum

Forum for general discussions and questions:

• https://forum.rclone.org

Gitub project

The project website is at:

• https://github.com/ncw/rclone

There you can file bug reports, ask for help or contribute pull requests.

Google+

Rclone has a Google+ page which announcements are posted to

• Google+ page for general comments

Twitter

You can also follow me on twitter for rclone announcments

• @njcw

Email

Or if all else fails or you want to ask something private or confidential email Nick Craig-Wood