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
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• Backblaze B2
• Hubic
• Microsoft One Drive
• Yandex Disk

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.

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.

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.

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 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 sha1sum remote:path

Produces an sha1sum file for all the objects in the path. This is in the same format as the standard sha1sum tool produces.

rclone size remote:path

Prints the total size of objects in remote:path and the number of objects.

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. Note that this does not obey include/exclude filters - everything will be removed. Use delete if you want to selectively delete files.

rclone delete remote:path

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 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 dedupe remote:path

Interactively find duplicate files and offer to delete all but one or rename them to be different. Only useful with Google Drive which can have duplicate file names.

$ rclone dedupe drive:dupes
2016/01/31 14:13:11 Google drive root 'dupes': Looking for duplicates
two.txt: Found 3 duplicates
  1:       564374 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:22.159000000, md5sum 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
  2:      1744073 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:12.490000000, md5sum 851957f7fb6f0bc4ce76be966d336802
  3:      6048320 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:07:02.111000000, md5sum 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
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
one.txt: Found 2 duplicates
  1:         6579 bytes, 2016-01-31 14:05:01.235000000, md5sum 2b76c776249409d925ae7ccd49aea59b
  2:         6579 bytes, 2016-01-31 12:50:30.318000000, md5sum 2b76c776249409d925ae7ccd49aea59b
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> 2
one.txt: Deleted 1 extra copies

The result being

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
   564374 2016-01-31 14:07:22.159000000 two-1.txt
  1744073 2016-01-31 14:07:12.490000000 two-2.txt
  6048320 2016-01-31 14:07:02.111000000 two-3.txt
     6579 2016-01-31 12:50:30.318000000 one.txt

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 2**10, 2**20, 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 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.

-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.

--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.

--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.

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.

--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.

Specifying --delete-during (default value) will delete files while checking and uploading files. This is usually the fastest option.

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.

-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 - 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.

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.

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.