rclone
rclone is a CLI tool that makes it easier to manage and sync files and directories in cloud storage and remote systems. It's officially supported by Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, and many other services.
Common rclone
use cases:
-
Mounting a remote: Mount a remote storage system as a local filesystem using
rclone mount
. -
Filters and Exclusions: Use filters to include or exclude files based on patterns.
-
Limit bandwidth on transfer: Limit the transfer rate to avoid using excessive bandwidth.
-
Encrypt files and Cache: Use the
crypt
backend to encrypt files and thecache
backend to cache files for faster access. -
Schedule Backups: Schedule
rclone
commands using cron jobs or other task scheduling mechanisms.
Let's see in detail how to use rclone
.
First, open a terminal window and launch
sudo apt update && sudo apt install rclone
This will install rclone
in your system. Now it needs to be configured:
rclone config
The configuration wizard will ask for the remote name, storage type, and credentials (whether they are API keys, authentication tokens, etc.), so be sure to check the instructions given by your provider and take note of these credentials.
After that, rclone
is ready to be used.
Basic Usage
It's good practice to test every command by attaching the --dry-run
flag. After ensuring that everything is okay, repeat the command without --dry-run
option.
- List all of the remotes configured
rclone listremotes
- Copy files from source storage to destination storage
rclone copy source:path dest:path
where source:path
is the source storage and dest:path
is the remote storage of destination (e.g a personal folder sent to a remote, or a file sent from a remote to another)
- Sync storage
rclone sync source:path dest:path
- List all of the files in a remote
rclone ls remote:path
- Delete all files from a specific path in the remote
rclone delete remote:path