rclone/docs/content/docs.md

title	description	date
Documentation	Rclone Usage	2015-06-06

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

Usage

Rclone syncs a directory tree from one storage system to another.

Its syntax is like this

Syntax: [options] subcommand <parameters> <parameters...>

Source and destination paths are specified by the name you gave the storage system in the config file then the sub path, eg "drive:myfolder" to look at "myfolder" in Google drive.

You can define as many storage paths as you like in the config file.

Subcommands

rclone copy source:path dest:path

Copy the source to the destination. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Doesn't delete files from the destination.

rclone sync source:path dest:path

Sync the source to the destination, changing the destination only. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Destination is updated to match source, including deleting files if necessary. Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run flag.

rclone ls [remote:path]

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

rclone lsd [remote:path]

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

rclone lsl [remote:path]

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

rclone md5sum [remote:path]

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

rclone mkdir remote:path

Make the path if it doesn't already exist

rclone rmdir remote:path

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

rclone purge remote:path

Remove the path and all of its contents.

rclone check source:path dest:path

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

rclone config

Enter an interactive configuration session.

rclone help

Prints help on rclone commands and options.

Server Side Copy

Drive, S3, Dropbox, Swift and Google Cloud Storage support server side copy.

This means if you want to copy one folder to another then rclone won't download all the files and re-upload them; it will instruct the server to copy them in place.

Eg

rclone copy s3:oldbucket s3:newbucket

Will copy the contents of oldbucket to newbucket without downloading and re-uploading.

Remotes which don't support server side copy (eg local) will download and re-upload in this case.

Server side copies are used with sync and copy and will be identified in the log when using the -v flag.

Server side copies will only be attempted if the remote names are the same.

This can be used when scripting to make aged backups efficiently, eg

rclone sync remote:current-backup remote:previous-backup
rclone sync /path/to/files remote:current-backup

Options

Rclone has a number of options to control its behaviour.

Options which use TIME use the go time parser. A duration string is a possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".

Options which use SIZE use kByte by default. However a suffix of k for kBytes, M for MBytes and G for GBytes may be used. These are the binary units, eg 210, 220, 2**30 respectively.

--bwlimit=SIZE

Bandwidth limit in kBytes/s, or use suffix k|M|G. The default is 0 which means to not limit bandwidth.

For example to limit bandwidth usage to 10 MBytes/s use --bwlimit 10M

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

--checkers=N

The number of checkers to run in parallel. Checkers do the equality checking of files during a sync. For some storage systems (eg s3, swift, dropbox) this can take a significant amount of time so they are run in parallel.

The default is to run 8 checkers in parallel.

-c, --checksum

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check MD5SUM and size to determine if files are equal.

This is very useful when transferring between remotes which store the MD5SUM on the object which include swift, s3, drive, and google cloud storage.

Eg rclone --checksum sync s3:/bucket swift:/bucket would run much quicker than without the --checksum flag.

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

--config=CONFIG_FILE

Specify the location of the rclone config file. Normally this is in your home directory as a file called .rclone.conf. If you run rclone -h and look at the help for the --config option you will see where the default location is for you. Use this flag to override the config location, eg rclone --config=".myconfig" .config.

--contimeout=TIME

Set the connection timeout. This should be in go time format which looks like 5s for 5 seconds, 10m for 10 minutes, or 3h30m.

The connection timeout is the amount of time rclone will wait for a connection to go through to a remote object storage system. It is 1m by default.

-n, --dry-run

Do a trial run with no permanent changes. Use this in combination with the -v flag to see what rclone would do without actually doing it. Useful when setting up the sync command.

--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.

--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.

-q, --quiet

Normally rclone outputs stats and a completion message. If you set this flag it will make as little output as possible.

--size-only

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check only the size.

This can be useful transferring files from dropbox which have been modified by the desktop sync client which doesn't set checksums of modification times in the same way as rclone.

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

--stats=TIME

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

This sets the interval.

The default is 1m. Use 0 to disable.

--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.

-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

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.

--cpuprofile=FILE

Write cpu profile to file. This can be analysed with go tool pprof.