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Comment by johnmarcus | Hacker News Reader

i love rclone. my only gripe is that the "sync" command doesn't really seem to act like a sync - it overwrites the target directory with the source directory, there is no synchronization between the two. It was just unexpected behavior the first time I did it.

Other than that, it awesome how it works with so many data storage providers. If it helps anyone, the last time I looked at pricing (a couple months ago) IBM had the cheapest per GB cloud storage of all the providers. I already have 1TB of Google Cloud for $2/mo, so I'm using that to keep my life simple, however, it's slow as far as data stores go.

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Weird.. I use rclone sync to move files between OS X in my room to Ubuntu in the garage and both of those to Google Drive. It has always just moved new files or changed files.

The sync appears to be unidirectional only

>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

The difference between "copy" and "sync" is also a bit subtle:

> Copy files from source to dest, skipping already copied

> Make source and dest identical, modifying destination only.

That is, while "sync" may delete files on the destination so that it mirrors the source, copy will never do so.

I feel a better name for "sync" would have been "clone", conveying both the unidirectionality and the fact that it will make the destination like source.

I use rclone on my NAS with OpenDrive syncing with a couple of Cron tasks to keep my files backed up. They have an unlimited plan for $10/mo, which is the only cloud provider I could find with such a plan...

You're technically not supposed to do this with a NAS but I only have about ~40GB of files so far. If/when I get into the "Many TB" territory, I'll figure something else out..

The sync comparison operation might need to happen on something different than the default, that could be why it's not syncing. Like you might need to use time instead of md5

Hm, you might want to look into the SYNC command line argument:

https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/

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