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Comment by aborsy | Hacker News Reader

Rclone is popular for good reasons. I have even replaced Dropbox with rclone 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.

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» * 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

A few years back, around 2016 I wanted to see how One drive syncing worked. So I set my IRC client (hexchat) to save logs on my OneDrive folder. If I remember correctly, I had hundreds of gigabytes uploaded to onedrive under a month. I think I had the default 15 GB or 25 GB storage iirc. My guess is every time someone said something in a chat, the file changed and one drive thought it was prudent to sync it with its servers immediately?

When a file changes, should we upload the entire file? Is it possible to somehow only transmit the diff and only send what has changed? Would it even make sense as most "normal" users are probably on mobile and diff has a cost in CPU and therefore battery, right? Or is CPU cheaper than WiFi for battery?

One of the features I like about Amazon.com Photos on Android is I can say only upload photos when charging.

> Is it possible to somehow only transmit the diff and only send what has changed?

This is what rsync does.

edit this refers to rsync the software, not rsync the company that provides storage.

Really? How does it know what the diff is when it only has the new version of the file?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync#Algorithm

> Rclone offers client side encryption

Can you view files in Dropbox website if they are encrypted locally by Rclone?

> You can mount the remote.

Do you have to mount the remote every time after rebooting your machine?

If I use Rclone to sync all dropbox files to my local machine, are they still accessible if my machine is offline?

Also popular for some unfortunate reasons as well, it is becoming the exfil and sync tool of choice for ransomware operators.

context : first hand experience in IR

Slight tangent: I always found it to be an added plus/bonus to a tool if it can survive being scrutinized by well-formed and long-lasting groups.

What would be my preferred VPN/Mail/Payment/Storage/Encryption tools?

The one that has been scrutinized by TLA to catch these groups. On a long enough time scale, it can expose if they truly are "no logs", "fully encrypted", "privacy-conscious" or if it's just marketing buzzwords when they actually face a warrant.

I use it for OneDrive on Linux. It's not as fast as Dropbox (which I used previously to OneDrive) but works great for backups.

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