Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage | Hacker News Reader

Rclone syncs your files to cloud storage

rclone.org

37 pointsaxiomdata3168 comments

Rclone is very popular, and for good reasons. I have even replaced Dropbox with that nowadays.

Why replacing Dropbox sync, one may ask? Because:

* 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.

* You can mount the remote. Files don’t have to exist on client’s side to occupy space. This tool mounts anything!

* You learn one tool and use it everywhere

* 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

* 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.

Fantastic software! I often prefer using rclone over the vendor provided tool. For example, with the official b2 tool I can only register one active key at a time. This means I can only upload to buckets on one account (without some kind of workaround). With rclone, I can use as many b2 keys and accounts as I want/need for multiple endpoints.

Also, on windows I prefer using rclone over robocopy/xcopy since it’s a lot more robust and has more features.

I don't know why all the official cloud clients are so limited, but rclone shows how easily they could enable a lot of the missing features.

I was excited when I found this utility a few months back. I've used it to migrate all the files of two old machines to multiple cloud backups pretty easily.

I plan to set up cron jobs to use it for simple cross-cloud syncing.

If rclone preserved created dates when moving from windows to aws, I would be a very happy person.

I move millions of files with it every week and it does a wonderfull job.

If anyone thinks they can add this feature I would happily sponsor it.

How does this handle conflicts? If the cloud file is updated, will it rewrite the local file? What if the local file is changed, does that change the cloud file. What if both change when there is no internet, and then the internet returns, what changed?

If you use the rclone sync command it will alter the destination directory to look like the source. If you use the rclone copy command it will do the same but without deleting anything. There are flags for eg skipping files that have a newer updated time at the destination. Rclone doesn't do live sync with file watching. It's a command line utility you call with a source and destination.

Is there a simple way of configuring it to take the newer file and write it to the older one? That way I can alter and view files from the computer and from the cloud.

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