Syncing using rclone

Posted on August 23, 2020

I have been a Dropbox user for over a decade. Part of the attraction for me was that it is one of the few synchronization services that fully supports Linux. I had it installed on two servers, my office desktop, my laptop, and most of my mobile devices. Couple of years ago, my employer moved most of its IT services with Microsoft 365, which gives me access to storage space on Microsoft OneDrive as well. Plus, I have purchased additional storage on Google (for backing up my personal photos). But I never seriously used Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive for synchronization because all my computers run Linux and neither of these services had a Linux client.

Now with the pandemic, I am involved in more remote collaborations and some of my collaborators prefer Google Drive and some administrative projects are managed on Microsoft Teams and use the shared files on Microsoft Teams. At first, I was simply viewing these files using a browser but after a while manually synchronizing files by uploading using a browser became annoying. So, I began to search for ways in which I could synchronize with these services on Linux.

Enter rclone, which markets itself as “The Swiss army knife of cloud storage”. Rclone can sync with Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, and more than 40 other cloud storage products!

So far I am only doing manual syncing. First, create a new “remote” using rclone config and then add a cron-job which periodically runs:

rclone copy REMOTE:folder local-folder
rclone copy local-folder REMOTE:folder

So far, I have used this on projects where the files change once a week and there is no risk of conflicts etc., and it has worked flawlessly. Rclone provides an option to mount a cloud storage service locally and I plan to explore that if/when I need to work on a project which is updated more frequently.

This entry was posted in Syncronization and tagged rclone, dropbox, google-drive, one-drive.