Rclone is popular for good reasons. I have even replaced Dropbox with rclone nowadays. Why replacing Dropbox sync, one may ask?<p>Because:<p>* Rclone offers client side encryption (with a good algorithm and from a good library). Cloud providers usually offer server side encryption, but don’t want to offer client side encryption.<p>* You can mount the remote. Files don’t have to exist on client’s side to occupy space. This tool mounts anything!<p>* You learn one tool and use it everywhere<p>* It’s is under user’s control. You run it with a schedule that you want. I don’t have to run a closed source app continuously scanning my computer<p>* Robust, feature full, open source (especially for verification of encryption), large community for getting help, and under heavy development
Rclone combined with Restic is how I manage my data in the cloud.
Rclone is fantastic. It's much easier to use that most of the cloud storage APIs themselves.<p>Plus rclone makes it easy to migrate between providers. I just moved a backup process from Gcloud to B2 now my side business is growing up: you can start with whatever storage is free/convenient then switch to something more mature later with minimal effort.
Here is a keystroke-by-keystroke HOWTO that we wrote last year:<p><a href="https://rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html" rel="nofollow">https://rsync.net/resources/howto/rclone.html</a><p>and although the example is S3 <-> rsync.net, it is <i>not necessarily</i> rsync.net-specific.<p>You could use this HOWTO/workflow for any two targets.
I like rclone for the wide array of storage options [1] plus a special crypt remote [2] that provides client-side encryption for any of the other storage options. There is also a browser GUI you can spin up locally if that floats your boat [3].<p>[1]: <a href="https://rclone.org/overview/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/overview/</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://rclone.org/crypt/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/crypt/</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://rclone.org/gui/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/gui/</a>
Nick Craig-Wood (ncw) was the CEO of the last company I worked for, and I consider it a privilege to have worked for him. He's one of the smartest people I've ever met, and an incredibly nice person too. I have many fond memories of the annual staff barbecue in his garden.
I once made a software distribution system for software with thousands of files in a huge directory tree using rclone. I'd upload it all to S3 and then clients could run an update script that used rclone to sync just the changed files. No server needed. A better solution probably exists but I couldn't find any other system at the time that could work directly from S3 or any other dumb file host and still selectively sync only changed files.
I'm not sure why this bothers me so much but it does not "sync between cloud storage providers".<p>I don't really know how this misunderstanding is so pervasive, even among the HN crowd, but no, no amount of magical code can make it possible to directly migrate between S3 and Google Drive. It's going to download, and upload to sync.<p>This is even reflected in the project's description line, which is more accurate than the current HN headline: <i>Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a command-line program to sync files and directories to and from different cloud storage providers.</i><p>That having been said, it's of course invaluable software. Mounting 10TB of Google Drive into a Raspberry Pi running Plex is still something that feels like it should be harder to accomplish than it is.
I'm using rclone beta right now for its bisync feature. This was the last missing piece that I badly needed to synchronize my notes. And I'm very happy that it's finally implemented. Kudos to all rclone contributors!
Past discussions:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398303" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12398303</a> (5 years ago)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791036" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22791036</a> (2 years ago)