Rclone

Logo

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

Features

Links

Install

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

Download the relevant binary.

Or alternatively if you have Go installed use

go get 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 (remove -f if using go < 1.4)

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

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

linux binary downloaded files install example

unzip rclone-v1.17-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone-v1.17-linux-amd64
#copy binary file
sudo cp rclone /usr/sbin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/sbin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/sbin/rclone
#install manpage
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb

Configure

First you'll need to configure rclone. As the object storage systems have quite complicated authentication these are kept in a config file .rclone.conf in your home directory by default. (You can use the --config option to choose a different config file.)

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

rclone config

See the following for detailed instructions for

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 copy source:path dest:path

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.

rclone sync source:path dest:path

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.

move source:path dest:path

Moves the source to the destination.

If there are no filters in use this is equivalent to a copy followed by a purge, but may using server side operations to speed it up if possible.

If filters are in use then it is equivalent to a copy followed by delete, followed by an rmdir (which only removes the directory if empty). The individual file moves will be moved with srver side operations if possible.

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

rclone ls remote:path

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

rclone lsd remote:path

List all directories/containers/buckets in the the path.

rclone lsl remote:path

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

rclone md5sum remote:path

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

rclone sha1sum remote:path

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

rclone size remote:path

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

rclone mkdir remote:path

Make the path if it doesn't already exist

rclone rmdir remote:path

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

rclone purge remote:path

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 delete remote:path

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 check source:path dest:path

Checks the files in the source and destination match. It compares sizes and MD5SUMs and prints a report of files which don't match. It doesn't alter the source or destination.

rclone dedupe remote:path

Interactively find duplicate files and offer to delete all but one or rename them to be different. Only useful with Google Drive which can have duplicate file names.

$ rclone dedupe drive:dupes
2016/01/31 14:13:11 Google drive root 'dupes': Looking for duplicates
two.txt: Found 3 duplicates
  1:       564374 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:22.159000000, md5sum 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
  2:      1744073 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:12.490000000, md5sum 851957f7fb6f0bc4ce76be966d336802
  3:      6048320 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:02.111000000, md5sum 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
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
one.txt: Found 2 duplicates
  1:         6579 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:05:01.235000000, md5sum 2b76c776249409d925ae7ccd49aea59b
  2:         6579 bytes, 2016-01-31 12:50:30.318000000, md5sum 2b76c776249409d925ae7ccd49aea59b
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> 2
one.txt: Deleted 1 extra copies

The result being

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
   564374 2016-01-31 14:07:22.159000000 two-1.txt
  1744073 2016-01-31 14:07:12.490000000 two-2.txt
  6048320 2016-01-31 14:07:02.111000000 two-3.txt
     6579 2016-01-31 12:50:30.318000000 one.txt

rclone config

Enter an interactive configuration session.

rclone help

Prints help on rclone commands and options.

Server Side Copy

Drive, S3, Dropbox, Swift and Google Cloud Storage 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 (eg local) 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.

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 k for kBytes, M for MBytes and G for GBytes may be used. These are the binary units, eg 2**10, 2**20, 2**30 respectively.

--bwlimit=SIZE

Bandwidth limit in kBytes/s, or use suffix 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

This only limits the bandwidth of the data transfer, it doesn't limit the bandwith of the directory listings etc.

--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 this is in your home directory as a file called .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.

-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-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.

--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.

--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.

--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.

-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 helps 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.

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

--stats=TIME

Rclone will print stats at regular intervals to show its progress.

This sets the interval.

The default is 1m. Use 0 to disable.

--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.

Specifying --delete-during (default value) will delete files while checking and uploading files. This is usually the fastest option.

Specifying --delete-after will delay deletion of files until all new/updated files have been successfully transfered.

--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 remoes, 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, --verbose

If you set this flag, rclone will become very verbose telling you about every file it considers and transfers.

Very useful for debugging.

-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 term 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.

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 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-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 - may contain sensitive info. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging only.

--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.

Filtering

For the filtering options

See the filtering section.

Exit Code

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

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. 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"

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"

Differences between rsync and rclone patterns

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

Rclone ignores / at the end of a pattern.

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

How the rules are used

Rclone maintains a list of include rules and exclude rules.

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

If the matcher falls off the bottom of 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

This would exclude

Adding filtering rules

Filtering rules are added with the following command line flags.

--exclude - Exclude files matching pattern

Add a single exclude rule with --exclude.

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

--exclude-from - Read exclude patterns from file

Add exclude rules from a file.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

--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:

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

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

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
Google Drive MD5 Yes No Yes
Amazon S3 MD5 Yes No No
Openstack Swift MD5 Yes No No
Dropbox - No Yes No
Google Cloud Storage MD5 Yes No No
Amazon Cloud Drive MD5 No Yes No
Microsoft One Drive SHA1 Yes Yes No
Hubic MD5 Yes No No
Backblaze B2 SHA1 Partial No No
Yandex Disk MD5 Yes No No
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.

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.

Backblaze B2 preserves file modification times on files uploaded and downloaded, but doesn't use them to decide which objects to sync.

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 may or may not be case sensitive depending on OS.

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.

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:

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 6
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
--------------------
[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

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

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-chunk-size=SIZE

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

--drive-full-list

Use a full listing for directory list. More data but usually quicker. On by default, disable with --full-drive-list=false.

--drive-upload-cutoff=SIZE

File size cutoff for switching to chunked upload. Default is 256kB.

--drive-use-trash

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

--drive-auth-owner-only

Only consider files owned by the authenticated user. Requires that --drive-full-list=true (default).

--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.

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
html text/html An HTML Document
jpg image/jpeg A JPEG Image File
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
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

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.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / 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"
   / South America (Sao Paulo) Region
 9 | Needs location constraint sa-east-1.
   \ "sa-east-1"
   / If using an S3 clone that only understands v2 signatures
10 | 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
11 | 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 / South America (Sao Paulo) Region.
   \ "sa-east-1"
location_constraint> 1
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
env_auth = false
access_key_id = access_key
secret_access_key = secret_key
region = us-east-1
endpoint = 
location_constraint = 
--------------------
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

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:

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

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.

Swift

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

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 10
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
Tenant name - optional
tenant> 
Region name - optional
region> 
Storage URL - optional
storage_url> 
Remote config
--------------------
[remote]
user = user_name
key = password_or_api_key
auth = https://auth.api.rackspacecloud.com/v1.0
tenant = 
region = 
storage_url = 
--------------------
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

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.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / 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 MD5SUMs

Dropbox doesn't provide the ability to set modification times in the V1 public API, so rclone can't support modified time with Dropbox.

This may change in the future - see these issues for details:

Dropbox doesn't return any sort of checksum (MD5 or SHA1).

Together that means that syncs to dropbox will effectively have the --size-only flag set.

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.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 5
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
Access Control List for new objects.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 * Object owner gets OWNER access, and all Authenticated Users get READER access.
 1) authenticatedRead
 * Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team owners get OWNER access.
 2) bucketOwnerFullControl
 * Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team owners get READER access.
 3) bucketOwnerRead
 * Object owner gets OWNER access [default if left blank].
 4) private
 * Object owner gets OWNER access, and project team members get access according to their roles.
 5) projectPrivate
 * Object owner gets OWNER access, and all Users get READER access.
 6) publicRead
object_acl> 4
Access Control List for new buckets.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 * Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Authenticated Users get READER access.
 1) authenticatedRead
 * Project team owners get OWNER access [default if left blank].
 2) private
 * Project team members get access according to their roles.
 3) projectPrivate
 * Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Users get READER access.
 4) publicRead
 * Project team owners get OWNER access, and all Users get WRITER access.
 5) publicReadWrite
bucket_acl> 2
Remote config
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

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 Cloud Drive

Paths are specified as remote:path

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

The initial setup for Amazon cloud drive involves getting a token from Amazon 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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 1
Amazon Application Client Id - leave blank normally.
client_id> 
Amazon Application Client Secret - leave blank normally.
client_secret> 
Remote config
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":"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 cloud drive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your Amazon cloud drive

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to an Amazon cloud drive directory called backup

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and MD5SUMs

Amazon cloud 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 cloud drive website.

Specific options

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

Files this size or more will be downloaded via their tempLink. This is to work around a problem with Amazon Cloud 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.

Limitations

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

Amazon cloud 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 cloud 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.

Unfortunatly 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=50GB option to limit the maximum size of uploaded files.

Microsoft One Drive

Paths are specified as remote:path

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

The initial setup for One Drive 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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 9
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 One Drive

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your One Drive

rclone ls remote:

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

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and hashes

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

Rclone only supports your default One Drive, 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 One Drive 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.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 7
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

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

Code to refresh the OpenStack token isn't done yet which may cause problems with very long transfers.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / 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

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 set on upload, read on download and shown in listings. They are not used in syncing as unfortunately B2 doesn't have an API method to set them independently 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. You can use the --checksum flag.

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.

The old versions of files are visible in the B2 web interface, but not via rclone yet.

Rclone doesn't provide any way of managing old versions (downloading them or deleting them) at the moment. When you purge a bucket, all the old versions will be deleted.

API

Here are some notes I made on the backblaze API while integrating it with rclone which detail the changes I'd like to see. With a couple of small tweaks Backblaze could enable rclone to not make a temporary copy of files when doing cloud to cloud copies and fully support modification times.

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 Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 11
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

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.

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, '�'. 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.

Changelog

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.

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.

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 http://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

Contributors

Contact the rclone project

The project website is at:

There you can file bug reports, ask for help or contribute pull requests.

See also

Or email