The rclone api access key was revoked.<p>A few months ago, I was doing extensive research on personal cloud backups (Backblaze, Amazon Cloud Drive, etc). My requirement was to have <i>client-side</i> encryption synced to the cloud. A modicum of googling led me to rclone. After reading about how rclone works, I immediately made a mental comparison to Amazon's "official" client GUI sync program and thought, <i>"there's no way Amazon has blessed rclone."</i> It would be very risky to invest hours into building custom backup scripts built on top of rclone if Amazon blocks it. Well, it turns out <i>that's exactly what has happened.</i>
Link as originally submitted leads to a commit message where the submitter, maintainer of git-annex-remote-rclone, a tool which wraps the multi-provider cloud storage client rclone [1], makes the following comment:<p><i>"Amazon has, without warning, revoked the API keys necessary for users to access the data that Amazon's paying customers have entrusted with Amazon. A data storage offering that simply stops working one day is not a data storage offering at all."</i><p>In effect, this is a self-submission to an opinion that leads to a dead end; I propose a better source is this reddit thread [2] which includes a screenshot of an email from Amazon support confirming the news.<p>As another poster writes, Amazon has revoked rclone's OAuth2 API key. However, consider that rclone's default OAuth2 client id and secret are compiled into the rclone executable, and thus effectively public; aka. anyone can extract them and pretend to be rclone, and fool users into obtaining access and abuse them for unrelated purposes.<p>A <i>far</i> better option is for the cloud provider to let users generate their own OAuth2 clients, such as Google does (and supposedly Microsoft, although for me it's always errored out). Unfortunately, Amazon has a "call us" style of Developer access, which effectively translates to no new API access being granted to these types of users.<p>The speculation around the web is that Amazon also wanted to shut this down because they offered "unlimited" storage, and people were using it to store very large amounts of hard-to-compress, hard-to-dedup data. Breaking a popular tool used to accomplish this (e.g. it supported on-the-fly encryption, producing the exact style of difficult data) will cause some portion of less profitable users to migrate elsewhere. This may or may not be true, but it's certainly an intriguing point.<p>[1] <a href="https://rclone.org/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_confirmed_rclone_is_revoked_aka_banned/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/6c3mnv/amazon_...</a>
I used them years ago as part of free trial offer but they had rate limiting for their APIs ,it was totally unusable, to upload it would take months to finish my NAS drive, so i stopped using them completely. its the crappiest i have ever seen.