rclone(1) User Manual

Nick Craig-Wood

Aug 24, 2016

Rclone

Logo

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 One Drive
Hubic
Backblaze B2
Yandex Disk
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
Google+ page
Downloads
Install

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

Download the relevant binary.

Or alternatively if you have Go 1.5+ 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

go get -u -v 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
Installation with Ansible

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

Instructions

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

Google drive
Amazon S3
Swift / Rackspace Cloudfiles / Memset Memstore
Dropbox
Google Cloud Storage
Local filesystem
Amazon Drive
Backblaze B2
Hubic
Microsoft One Drive
Yandex Disk
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.

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

--size-only may be used to only compare the sizes, not the MD5SUMs.

rclone check source:path dest:path
rclone ls

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

Synopsis

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

rclone ls remote:path
rclone lsd

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

Synopsis

List all directories/containers/buckets in the 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
Options

      --dedupe-mode string   Dedupe mode interactive|skip|first|newest|oldest|rename.
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
rclone cat 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
rclone mount

Mount the remote as a mountpoint. EXPERIMENTAL

Synopsis

rclone mount allows Linux, FreeBSD and macOS 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 &
Stop the mount with

fusermount -u /path/to/local/mount
Or with OS X

umount -u /path/to/local/mount
Limitations

This can only read files seqentially, or write files sequentially. It can't read and write or seek in files.

rclonefs inherits rclone's directory handling. In rclone's world directories don't really exist. This means that empty directories will have a tendency to disappear once they fall out of the directory cache.

The bucket based FSes (eg swift, s3, google compute storage, b2) 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.

Only supported on Linux, FreeBSD and OS X 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.

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
TODO

Check hashes on upload/download
Preserve timestamps
Move directories
rclone mount remote:path /path/to/mountpoint
Options

      --debug-fuse   Debug the FUSE internals - needs -v.
      --no-modtime   Don't read the modification time (can speed things up).
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 single 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
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 "�s"), "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.

--bwlimit=SIZE

Bandwidth limit in kBytes/s, or use 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

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.

--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-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.

--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 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.

--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. This uses extra memory as it has to store the source listing before proceeding.

Specifying --delete-during (default value) will delete files while checking and uploading files. This is usually the fastest option. Currently this works the same as --delete-after but it may change in the future.

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 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.

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-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.

--no-traverse

The --no-traverse flag controls whether the destination file system is traversed when using the copy or move commands.

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, escpecially 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 3 levels of logging, Error, Info and Debug.

By default rclone logs Error and Info to standard error and Debug to standard output. This means you can redirect standard output and standard error to different places.

By default rclone will produce Error and Info level messages.

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

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

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

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.

Important Due to limitations of the command line parser you can only use any of these options once - if you duplicate them then rclone will use the last one only.

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"
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 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

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.

--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.

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
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 Drive	MD5	No	Yes	No
Microsoft One Drive	SHA1	Yes	Yes	No
Hubic	MD5	Yes	No	No
Backblaze B2	SHA1	Yes	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.

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.

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.

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 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

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-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-full-list

No longer does anything - kept for backwards compatibility.

--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.

--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.

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:

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)

Select a project or create a new project.

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

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.

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

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)
   \ "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
Canned ACL used when creating buckets and/or storing objects in S3.
For more info visit http://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>
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:

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).

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 from the web site.

When it configures itself Minio will print something like this

AccessKey: WLGDGYAQYIGI833EV05A  SecretKey: BYvgJM101sHngl2uzjXS/OBF/aMxAN06JrJ3qJlF Region: us-east-1

Minio Object Storage:
     http://127.0.0.1:9000
     http://10.0.0.3:9000

Minio Browser:
     http://127.0.0.1:9000
     http://10.0.0.3:9000
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> WLGDGYAQYIGI833EV05A
secret_access_key> BYvgJM101sHngl2uzjXS/OBF/aMxAN06JrJ3qJlF
region> us-east-1
endpoint> http://10.0.0.3:9000
location_constraint>
server_side_encryption>
Which makes the config file look like this

[minio]
env_auth = false
access_key_id = WLGDGYAQYIGI833EV05A
secret_access_key = BYvgJM101sHngl2uzjXS/OBF/aMxAN06JrJ3qJlF
region = us-east-1
endpoint = http://10.0.0.3:9000
location_constraint =
server_side_encryption =
Minio doesn't support all the features of S3 yet. In particular it doesn't support MD5 checksums (ETags) or metadata. This means rclone can't check MD5SUMs or store the modified date. However you can work around this with the --size-only flag of rclone.

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

rclone --size-only 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)
   \ "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
User domain - optional (v3 auth)
domain> Default
Tenant name - optional
tenant>
Tenant domain - optional (v3 auth)
tenant_domain>
Region name - optional
region>
Storage URL - optional
storage_url>
Remote config
AuthVersion - optional - set to (1,2,3) if your auth URL has no version
auth_version>
--------------------
[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.

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.

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)
   \ "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 V2 API
Allow syncs for remotes that can't set modtime on existing objects
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.

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 dropbix: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)
   \ "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
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
 * 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
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.

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.

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)
   \ "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 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.

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-time=TIME

Sometimes Amazon Drive gives an error when a file has been fully uploaded but the file appears anyway after a little while. This controls the time rclone waits - 2 minutes by default. You might want to increase the time if you are having problems with very big files. Upload with the -v flag for more info.

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.

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 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 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
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
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)
   \ "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 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
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. 100,000,000 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)
   \ "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.

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 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 5
Remote to encrypt/decrypt.
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"
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 = CfDxopZIXFG0Oo-ac7dPLWWOHkNJbw
password2 = HYUpfuzHJL8qnX9fOaIYijq0xnVLwyVzp3y4SF3TwYqAU6HLysk
--------------------
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

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

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.

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 (10�8 bytes) you would have a probability of approximately 2�10?�� 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, '?'. 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

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 �enfeld)
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 Bj�rn 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 Aur�lio 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
One Drive
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
One Drive
disable server side copy as it seems to be broken at Microsoft
v1.24 - 2015-11-07
New features
Add support for Microsoft One Drive
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 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

Nick Craig-Wood nick@craig-wood.com
Contributors

Alex Couper amcouper@gmail.com
Leonid Shalupov leonid@shalupov.com
Shimon Doodkin helpmepro1@gmail.com
Colin Nicholson colin@colinn.com
Klaus Post klauspost@gmail.com
Sergey Tolmachev tolsi.ru@gmail.com
Adriano Aur�lio Meirelles adriano@atinge.com
C. Bess cbess@users.noreply.github.com
Dmitry Burdeev dibu28@gmail.com
Joseph Spurrier github@josephspurrier.com
Bj�rn 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 �enfeld rush@logic.cz
Contact the rclone project

The project website is at:

https://github.com/ncw/rclone
There you can file bug reports, ask for help or contribute pull requests.

See also

Google+ page for general comments
Or email Nick Craig-Wood