rclone - Man Page

Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces. Over 70 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, as well as standard transfer protocols.

Rclone has powerful cloud equivalents to the unix commands rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, rm, and cat. Rclone's familiar syntax includes shell pipeline support, and --dry-run protection. It is used at the command line, in scripts or via its API.

Users call rclone "The Swiss army knife of cloud storage", and "Technology indistinguishable from magic".

Rclone really looks after your data. It preserves timestamps and verifies checksums at all times. Transfers over limited bandwidth; intermittent connections, or subject to quota can be restarted, from the last good file transferred. You can check (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_check/) the integrity of your files. Where possible, rclone employs server-side transfers to minimise local bandwidth use and transfers from one provider to another without using local disk.

Virtual backends wrap local and cloud file systems to apply encryption (https://rclone.org/crypt/), compression (https://rclone.org/compress/), chunking (https://rclone.org/chunker/), hashing (https://rclone.org/hasher/) and joining (https://rclone.org/union/).

Rclone mounts (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) any local, cloud or virtual filesystem as a disk on Windows, macOS, linux and FreeBSD, and also serves these over SFTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_sftp/), HTTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_http/), WebDAV (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_webdav/), FTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_ftp/) and DLNA (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_dlna/).

Rclone is mature, open-source software originally inspired by rsync and written in Go (https://golang.org). The friendly support community is familiar with varied use cases. Official Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Brew and Chocolatey repos. include rclone. For the latest version downloading from rclone.org (https://rclone.org/downloads/) is recommended.

Rclone is widely used on Linux, Windows and Mac. Third-party developers create innovative backup, restore, GUI and business process solutions using the rclone command line or API.

Rclone does the heavy lifting of communicating with cloud storage.

Rclone helps you:

• Backup (and encrypt) files to cloud storage
• Restore (and decrypt) files from cloud storage
• Mirror cloud data to other cloud services or locally
• Migrate data to the cloud, or between cloud storage vendors
• Mount multiple, encrypted, cached or diverse cloud storage as a disk
• Analyse and account for data held on cloud storage using lsf (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_lsf/), ljson (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_lsjson/), size (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_size/), ncdu (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_ncdu/)
• Union (https://rclone.org/union/) file systems together to present multiple local and/or cloud file systems as one

• Transfers

  • MD5, SHA1 hashes are checked at all times for file integrity
  • Timestamps are preserved on files
  • Operations can be restarted at any time
  • Can be to and from network, e.g. two different cloud providers
  • Can use multi-threaded downloads to local disk
• Copy (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/) new or changed files to cloud storage
• Sync (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/) (one way) to make a directory identical
• Bisync (https://rclone.org/bisync/) (two way) to keep two directories in sync bidirectionally
• Move (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_move/) files to cloud storage deleting the local after verification
• Check (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_check/) hashes and for missing/extra files
• Mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) your cloud storage as a network disk
• Serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) local or remote files over HTTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_http/)/WebDav (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_webdav/)/FTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_ftp/)/SFTP (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_sftp/)/DLNA (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_dlna/)
• Experimental Web based GUI (https://rclone.org/gui/)

(There are many others, built on standard protocols such as WebDAV or S3, that work out of the box.)

• 1Fichier
• Akamai Netstorage
• Alibaba Cloud (Aliyun) Object Storage System (OSS)
• Amazon S3
• Backblaze B2
• Box
• Ceph
• China Mobile Ecloud Elastic Object Storage (EOS)
• Arvan Cloud Object Storage (AOS)
• Citrix ShareFile
• Cloudflare R2
• DigitalOcean Spaces
• Digi Storage
• Dreamhost
• Dropbox
• Enterprise File Fabric
• Fastmail Files
• Files.com
• FTP
• Gofile
• Google Cloud Storage
• Google Drive
• Google Photos
• HDFS
• Hetzner Storage Box
• HiDrive
• HTTP
• ImageKit
• Internet Archive
• Jottacloud
• IBM COS S3
• IDrive e2
• IONOS Cloud
• Koofr
• Leviia Object Storage
• Liara Object Storage
• Linkbox
• Linode Object Storage
• Magalu
• Mail.ru Cloud
• Memset Memstore
• Mega
• Memory
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Microsoft Azure Files Storage
• Microsoft OneDrive
• Minio
• Nextcloud
• OVH
• Blomp Cloud Storage
• OpenDrive
• OpenStack Swift
• Oracle Cloud Storage Swift
• Oracle Object Storage
• ownCloud
• pCloud
• Petabox
• PikPak
• Pixeldrain
• premiumize.me
• put.io
• Proton Drive
• QingStor
• Qiniu Cloud Object Storage (Kodo)
• Quatrix by Maytech
• Rackspace Cloud Files
• rsync.net
• Scaleway
• Seafile
• Seagate Lyve Cloud
• SeaweedFS
• SFTP
• Sia
• SMB / CIFS
• StackPath
• Storj
• Synology
• SugarSync
• Tencent Cloud Object Storage (COS)
• Uloz.to
• Uptobox
• Wasabi
• WebDAV
• Yandex Disk
• Zoho WorkDrive
• The local filesystem

These backends adapt or modify other storage providers:

• Alias: Rename existing remotes
• Cache: Cache remotes (DEPRECATED)
• Chunker: Split large files
• Combine: Combine multiple remotes into a directory tree
• Compress: Compress files
• Crypt: Encrypt files
• Hasher: Hash files
• Union: Join multiple remotes to work together

• Home page (https://rclone.org/)
• GitHub project page for source and bug tracker (https://github.com/rclone/rclone)
• Rclone Forum (https://forum.rclone.org)
• Downloads (https://rclone.org/downloads/)

• Download (https://rclone.org/downloads/) the relevant binary.
• Extract the rclone executable, rclone.exe on Windows, from the archive.
• Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs (https://rclone.org/docs/) for more details.
• Optionally configure automatic execution.

See below for some expanded Linux / macOS / Windows instructions.

See the usage (https://rclone.org/docs/) docs for how to use rclone, or run rclone -h.

Already installed rclone can be easily updated to the latest version using the rclone selfupdate (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_selfupdate/) command.

See the release signing docs (https://rclone.org/release_signing/) for how to verify signatures on the release.

To install rclone on Linux/macOS/BSD systems, run:

sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

For beta installation, run:

sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash -s beta

Note that this script checks the version of rclone installed first and won't re-download if not needed.

Fetch and unpack

curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

Copy binary file

sudo cp rclone /usr/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/rclone

Install manpage

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs (https://rclone.org/docs/) for more details.

rclone config

brew install rclone

NOTE: This version of rclone will not support mount any more (see #5373 (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/5373)). If mounting is wanted on macOS, either install a precompiled binary or enable the relevant option when installing from source.

Note that this is a third party installer not controlled by the rclone developers so it may be out of date. Its current version is as below.

[IMAGE: Homebrew package (https://repology.org/badge/version-for-repo/homebrew/rclone.svg)] (https://repology.org/project/rclone/versions)

On macOS, rclone can also be installed via MacPorts (https://www.macports.org):

sudo port install rclone

Note that this is a third party installer not controlled by the rclone developers so it may be out of date. Its current version is as below.

[IMAGE: MacPorts port (https://repology.org/badge/version-for-repo/macports/rclone.svg)] (https://repology.org/project/rclone/versions)

More information here (https://ports.macports.org/port/rclone/).

To avoid problems with macOS gatekeeper enforcing the binary to be signed and notarized it is enough to download with curl.

Download the latest version of rclone.

cd && curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Unzip the download and cd to the extracted folder.

unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip && cd rclone-*-osx-amd64

Move rclone to your $PATH. You will be prompted for your password.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

(the mkdir command is safe to run, even if the directory already exists).

Remove the leftover files.

cd .. && rm -rf rclone-*-osx-amd64 rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs (https://rclone.org/docs/) for more details.

rclone config

When downloading a binary with a web browser, the browser will set the macOS gatekeeper quarantine attribute. Starting from Catalina, when attempting to run rclone, a pop-up will appear saying:

"rclone" cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.
macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware.

The simplest fix is to run

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine rclone

Fetch the correct binary for your processor type by clicking on these links. If not sure, use the first link.

• Intel/AMD - 64 Bit (https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-windows-amd64.zip)
• Intel/AMD - 32 Bit (https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-windows-386.zip)
• ARM - 64 Bit (https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-windows-arm64.zip)

Open this file in the Explorer and extract rclone.exe. Rclone is a portable executable so you can place it wherever is convenient.

Open a CMD window (or powershell) and run the binary. Note that rclone does not launch a GUI by default, it runs in the CMD Window.

• Run rclone.exe config to setup. See rclone config docs (https://rclone.org/docs/) for more details.
• Optionally configure automatic execution.

If you are planning to use the rclone mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) feature then you will need to install the third party utility WinFsp (https://winfsp.dev/) also.

Winget (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/) comes pre-installed with the latest versions of Windows. If not, update the App Installer (https://www.microsoft.com/p/app-installer/9nblggh4nns1) package from the Microsoft store.

To install rclone

winget install Rclone.Rclone

To uninstall rclone

winget uninstall Rclone.Rclone --force

Make sure you have Choco (https://chocolatey.org/) installed

choco search rclone
choco install rclone

This will install rclone on your Windows machine. If you are planning to use rclone mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) then

choco install winfsp

will install that too.

Note that this is a third party installer not controlled by the rclone developers so it may be out of date. Its current version is as below.

[IMAGE: Chocolatey package (https://repology.org/badge/version-for-repo/chocolatey/rclone.svg)] (https://repology.org/project/rclone/versions)

Make sure you have Scoop (https://scoop.sh/) installed

scoop install rclone

Note that this is a third party installer not controlled by the rclone developers so it may be out of date. Its current version is as below.

[IMAGE: Scoop package (https://repology.org/badge/version-for-repo/scoop/rclone.svg)] (https://repology.org/project/rclone/versions)

Many Linux, Windows, macOS and other OS distributions package and distribute rclone.

The distributed versions of rclone are often quite out of date and for this reason we recommend one of the other installation methods if possible.

You can get an idea of how up to date or not your OS distribution's package is here.

[IMAGE: Packaging status (https://repology.org/badge/vertical-allrepos/rclone.svg?columns=3)] (https://repology.org/project/rclone/versions)

The rclone developers maintain a docker image for rclone (https://hub.docker.com/r/rclone/rclone).

These images are built as part of the release process based on a minimal Alpine Linux.

The :latest tag will always point to the latest stable release. You can use the :beta tag to get the latest build from master. You can also use version tags, e.g. :1.49.1, :1.49 or :1.

$ docker pull rclone/rclone:latest
latest: Pulling from rclone/rclone
Digest: sha256:0e0ced72671989bb837fea8e88578b3fc48371aa45d209663683e24cfdaa0e11
...
$ docker run --rm rclone/rclone:latest version
rclone v1.49.1
- os/arch: linux/amd64
- go version: go1.12.9

There are a few command line options to consider when starting an rclone Docker container from the rclone image.

• You need to mount the host rclone config dir at /config/rclone into the Docker container. Due to the fact that rclone updates tokens inside its config file, and that the update process involves a file rename, you need to mount the whole host rclone config dir, not just the single host rclone config file.
• You need to mount a host data dir at /data into the Docker container.
• By default, the rclone binary inside a Docker container runs with UID=0 (root). As a result, all files created in a run will have UID=0. If your config and data files reside on the host with a non-root UID:GID, you need to pass these on the container start command line.

• If you want to access the RC interface (either via the API or the Web UI), it is required to set the --rc-addr to :5572 in order to connect to it from outside the container. An explanation about why this is necessary is present here (https://web.archive.org/web/20200808071950/https://pythonspeed.com/articles/docker-connection-refused/).

  • NOTE: Users running this container with the docker network set to host should probably set it to listen to localhost only, with 127.0.0.1:5572 as the value for --rc-addr

• It is possible to use rclone mount inside a userspace Docker container, and expose the resulting fuse mount to the host. The exact docker run options to do that might vary slightly between hosts. See, e.g. the discussion in this thread (https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/9448).

  You also need to mount the host /etc/passwd and /etc/group for fuse to work inside the container.

Here are some commands tested on an Ubuntu 18.04.3 host:

# config on host at ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf
# data on host at ~/data

# add a remote interactively
docker run --rm -it \
    --volume ~/.config/rclone:/config/rclone \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    rclone/rclone \
    config

# make sure the config is ok by listing the remotes
docker run --rm \
    --volume ~/.config/rclone:/config/rclone \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    rclone/rclone \
    listremotes

# perform mount inside Docker container, expose result to host
mkdir -p ~/data/mount
docker run --rm \
    --volume ~/.config/rclone:/config/rclone \
    --volume ~/data:/data:shared \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    --volume /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro --volume /etc/group:/etc/group:ro \
    --device /dev/fuse --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --security-opt apparmor:unconfined \
    rclone/rclone \
    mount dropbox:Photos /data/mount &
ls ~/data/mount
kill %1

[IMAGE: Get it from the Snap Store (https://snapcraft.io/static/images/badges/en/snap-store-black.svg)] (https://snapcraft.io/rclone)

Make sure you have Snapd installed (https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd)

$ sudo snap install rclone

Due to the strict confinement of Snap, rclone snap cannot access real /home/$USER/.config/rclone directory, default config path is as below.

• Default config directory:

  • /home/$USER/snap/rclone/current/.config/rclone

Note: Due to the strict confinement of Snap, rclone mount feature is not supported.

If mounting is wanted, either install a precompiled binary or enable the relevant option when installing from source.

Note that this is controlled by community maintainer (https://github.com/boukendesho/rclone-snap) not the rclone developers so it may be out of date. Its current version is as below.

[IMAGE: rclone (https://snapcraft.io/rclone/badge.svg)] (https://snapcraft.io/rclone)

Make sure you have git and Go (https://golang.org/) installed. Go version 1.18 or newer is required, the latest release is recommended. You can get it from your package manager, or download it from golang.org/dl (https://golang.org/dl/). Then you can run the following:

git clone https://github.com/rclone/rclone.git
cd rclone
go build

This will check out the rclone source in subfolder rclone, which you can later modify and send pull requests with. Then it will build the rclone executable in the same folder. As an initial check you can now run ./rclone version (.\rclone version on Windows).

Note that on macOS and Windows the mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) command will not be available unless you specify an additional build tag cmount.

go build -tags cmount

This assumes you have a GCC compatible C compiler (GCC or Clang) in your PATH, as it uses cgo (https://pkg.go.dev/cmd/cgo). But on Windows, the cgofuse (https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse) library that the cmount implementation is based on, also supports building without cgo (https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/WindowsDLLs), i.e. by setting environment variable CGO_ENABLED to value 0 (static linking). This is how the official Windows release of rclone is being built, starting with version 1.59. It is still possible to build with cgo on Windows as well, by using the MinGW port of GCC, e.g. by installing it in a MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org) distribution (make sure you install it in the classic mingw64 subsystem, the ucrt64 version is not compatible).

Additionally, to build with mount on Windows, you must install the third party utility WinFsp (https://winfsp.dev/), with the "Developer" feature selected. If building with cgo, you must also set environment variable CPATH pointing to the fuse include directory within the WinFsp installation (normally C:\Program Files (x86)\WinFsp\inc\fuse).

You may add arguments -ldflags -s to omit symbol table and debug information, making the executable file smaller, and -trimpath to remove references to local file system paths. The official rclone releases are built with both of these.

go build -trimpath -ldflags -s -tags cmount

If you want to customize the version string, as reported by the rclone version command, you can set one of the variables fs.Version, fs.VersionTag (to keep default suffix but customize the number), or fs.VersionSuffix (to keep default number but customize the suffix). This can be done from the build command, by adding to the -ldflags argument value as shown below.

go build -trimpath -ldflags "-s -X github.com/rclone/rclone/fs.Version=v9.9.9-test" -tags cmount

On Windows, the official executables also have the version information, as well as a file icon, embedded as binary resources. To get that with your own build you need to run the following command before the build command. It generates a Windows resource system object file, with extension .syso, e.g. resource_windows_amd64.syso, that will be automatically picked up by future build commands.

go run bin/resource_windows.go

The above command will generate a resource file containing version information based on the fs.Version variable in source at the time you run the command, which means if the value of this variable changes you need to re-run the command for it to be reflected in the version information. Also, if you override this version variable in the build command as described above, you need to do that also when generating the resource file, or else it will still use the value from the source.

go run bin/resource_windows.go -version v9.9.9-test

Instead of executing the go build command directly, you can run it via the Makefile. The default target changes the version suffix from "-DEV" to "-beta" followed by additional commit details, embeds version information binary resources on Windows, and copies the resulting rclone executable into your GOPATH bin folder ($(go env GOPATH)/bin, which corresponds to ~/go/bin/rclone by default).

make

To include mount command on macOS and Windows with Makefile build:

make GOTAGS=cmount

There are other make targets that can be used for more advanced builds, such as cross-compiling for all supported os/architectures, and packaging results into release artifacts. See Makefile (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/Makefile) and cross-compile.go (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/bin/cross-compile.go) for details.

Another alternative method for source installation is to download the source, build and install rclone - all in one operation, as a regular Go package. The source will be stored it in the Go module cache, and the resulting executable will be in your GOPATH bin folder ($(go env GOPATH)/bin, which corresponds to ~/go/bin/rclone by default).

go install github.com/rclone/rclone@latest

In some situations, rclone executable size might be too big for deployment in very restricted environments when all backends with large SDKs are included. To limit binary size unused backends can be commented out in backends/all/all.go and unused commands in cmd/all/all.go before building with go build or make

This can be done with Stefan Weichinger's ansible role (https://github.com/stefangweichinger/ansible-rclone).

Instructions

1. git clone https://github.com/stefangweichinger/ansible-rclone.git into your local roles-directory

2. add the role to the hosts you want rclone installed to:

       - hosts: rclone-hosts
         roles:
             - rclone

As mentioned above (https://rclone.org/install/#quickstart), rclone is single executable (rclone, or rclone.exe on Windows) that you can download as a zip archive and extract into a location of your choosing. When executing different commands, it may create files in different locations, such as a configuration file and various temporary files. By default the locations for these are according to your operating system, e.g. configuration file in your user profile directory and temporary files in the standard temporary directory, but you can customize all of them, e.g. to make a completely self-contained, portable installation.

Run the config paths (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_paths/) command to see the locations that rclone will use.

To override them set the corresponding options (as command-line arguments, or as environment variables (https://rclone.org/docs/#environment-variables)): - --config (https://rclone.org/docs/#config-config-file) - --cache-dir (https://rclone.org/docs/#cache-dir-dir) - --temp-dir (https://rclone.org/docs/#temp-dir-dir)

After installing and configuring rclone, as described above, you are ready to use rclone as an interactive command line utility. If your goal is to perform periodic operations, such as a regular sync (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/), you will probably want to configure your rclone command in your operating system's scheduler. If you need to expose service-like features, such as remote control (https://rclone.org/rc/), GUI (https://rclone.org/gui/), serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) or mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/), you will often want an rclone command always running in the background, and configuring it to run in a service infrastructure may be a better option. Below are some alternatives on how to achieve this on different operating systems.

NOTE: Before setting up autorun it is highly recommended that you have tested your command manually from a Command Prompt first.

The most relevant alternatives for autostart on Windows are: - Run at user log on using the Startup folder - Run at user log on, at system startup or at schedule using Task Scheduler - Run at system startup using Windows service

Rclone is a console application, so if not starting from an existing Command Prompt, e.g. when starting rclone.exe from a shortcut, it will open a Command Prompt window. When configuring rclone to run from task scheduler and windows service you are able to set it to run hidden in background. From rclone version 1.54 you can also make it run hidden from anywhere by adding option --no-console (it may still flash briefly when the program starts). Since rclone normally writes information and any error messages to the console, you must redirect this to a file to be able to see it. Rclone has a built-in option --log-file for that.

Example command to run a sync in background:

c:\rclone\rclone.exe sync c:\files remote:/files --no-console --log-file c:\rclone\logs\sync_files.txt

As mentioned in the mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) documentation, mounted drives created as Administrator are not visible to other accounts, not even the account that was elevated as Administrator. By running the mount command as the built-in SYSTEM user account, it will create drives accessible for everyone on the system. Both scheduled task and Windows service can be used to achieve this.

NOTE: Remember that when rclone runs as the SYSTEM user, the user profile that it sees will not be yours. This means that if you normally run rclone with configuration file in the default location, to be able to use the same configuration when running as the system user you must explicitly tell rclone where to find it with the --config (https://rclone.org/docs/#config-config-file) option, or else it will look in the system users profile path (C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile). To test your command manually from a Command Prompt, you can run it with the PsExec (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec) utility from Microsoft's Sysinternals suite, which takes option -s to execute commands as the SYSTEM user.

To quickly execute an rclone command you can simply create a standard Windows Explorer shortcut for the complete rclone command you want to run. If you store this shortcut in the special "Startup" start-menu folder, Windows will automatically run it at login. To open this folder in Windows Explorer, enter path %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup, or C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp if you want the command to start for every user that logs in.

This is the easiest approach to autostarting of rclone, but it offers no functionality to set it to run as different user, or to set conditions or actions on certain events. Setting up a scheduled task as described below will often give you better results.

Task Scheduler is an administrative tool built into Windows, and it can be used to configure rclone to be started automatically in a highly configurable way, e.g. periodically on a schedule, on user log on, or at system startup. It can run be configured to run as the current user, or for a mount command that needs to be available to all users it can run as the SYSTEM user. For technical information, see https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/taskschd/task-scheduler-start-page.

For running rclone at system startup, you can create a Windows service that executes your rclone command, as an alternative to scheduled task configured to run at startup.

For mount commands, rclone has a built-in Windows service integration via the third-party WinFsp library it uses. Registering as a regular Windows service easy, as you just have to execute the built-in PowerShell command New-Service (requires administrative privileges).

Example of a PowerShell command that creates a Windows service for mounting some remote:/files as drive letter X:, for all users (service will be running as the local system account):

New-Service -Name Rclone -BinaryPathName 'c:\rclone\rclone.exe mount remote:/files X: --config c:\rclone\config\rclone.conf --log-file c:\rclone\logs\mount.txt'

The WinFsp service infrastructure (https://github.com/billziss-gh/winfsp/wiki/WinFsp-Service-Architecture) supports incorporating services for file system implementations, such as rclone, into its own launcher service, as kind of "child services". This has the additional advantage that it also implements a network provider that integrates into Windows standard methods for managing network drives. This is currently not officially supported by Rclone, but with WinFsp version 2019.3 B2 / v1.5B2 or later it should be possible through path rewriting as described here (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/3340).

To Windows service running any rclone command, the excellent third-party utility NSSM (http://nssm.cc), the "Non-Sucking Service Manager", can be used. It includes some advanced features such as adjusting process priority, defining process environment variables, redirect to file anything written to stdout, and customized response to different exit codes, with a GUI to configure everything from (although it can also be used from command line ).

There are also several other alternatives. To mention one more, WinSW (https://github.com/winsw/winsw), "Windows Service Wrapper", is worth checking out. It requires .NET Framework, but it is preinstalled on newer versions of Windows, and it also provides alternative standalone distributions which includes necessary runtime (.NET 5). WinSW is a command-line only utility, where you have to manually create an XML file with service configuration. This may be a drawback for some, but it can also be an advantage as it is easy to back up and reuse the configuration settings, without having go through manual steps in a GUI. One thing to note is that by default it does not restart the service on error, one have to explicit enable this in the configuration file (via the "onfailure" parameter).

To always run rclone in background, relevant for mount commands etc, you can use systemd to set up rclone as a system or user service. Running as a system service ensures that it is run at startup even if the user it is running as has no active session. Running rclone as a user service ensures that it only starts after the configured user has logged into the system.

To run a periodic command, such as a copy/sync, you can set up a cron job.

First, you'll need to configure rclone. As the object storage systems have quite complicated authentication these are kept in a config file. (See the --config entry for how to find the config file and choose its location.)

The easiest way to make the config is to run rclone with the config option:

rclone config

See the following for detailed instructions for

• 1Fichier (https://rclone.org/fichier/)
• Akamai Netstorage (https://rclone.org/netstorage/)
• Alias (https://rclone.org/alias/)
• Amazon S3 (https://rclone.org/s3/)
• Backblaze B2 (https://rclone.org/b2/)
• Box (https://rclone.org/box/)
• Chunker (https://rclone.org/chunker/) - transparently splits large files for other remotes
• Citrix ShareFile (https://rclone.org/sharefile/)
• Compress (https://rclone.org/compress/)
• Combine (https://rclone.org/combine/)
• Crypt (https://rclone.org/crypt/) - to encrypt other remotes
• DigitalOcean Spaces (https://rclone.org/s3/#digitalocean-spaces)
• Digi Storage (https://rclone.org/koofr/#digi-storage)
• Dropbox (https://rclone.org/dropbox/)
• Enterprise File Fabric (https://rclone.org/filefabric/)
• Files.com (https://rclone.org/filescom/)
• FTP (https://rclone.org/ftp/)
• Gofile (https://rclone.org/gofile/)
• Google Cloud Storage (https://rclone.org/googlecloudstorage/)
• Google Drive (https://rclone.org/drive/)
• Google Photos (https://rclone.org/googlephotos/)
• Hasher (https://rclone.org/hasher/) - to handle checksums for other remotes
• HDFS (https://rclone.org/hdfs/)
• Hetzner Storage Box (https://rclone.org/sftp/#hetzner-storage-box)
• HiDrive (https://rclone.org/hidrive/)
• HTTP (https://rclone.org/http/)
• Internet Archive (https://rclone.org/internetarchive/)
• Jottacloud (https://rclone.org/jottacloud/)
• Koofr (https://rclone.org/koofr/)
• Linkbox (https://rclone.org/linkbox/)
• Mail.ru Cloud (https://rclone.org/mailru/)
• Mega (https://rclone.org/mega/)
• Memory (https://rclone.org/memory/)
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage (https://rclone.org/azureblob/)
• Microsoft Azure Files Storage (https://rclone.org/azurefiles/)
• Microsoft OneDrive (https://rclone.org/onedrive/)
• OpenStack Swift / Rackspace Cloudfiles / Blomp Cloud Storage / Memset Memstore (https://rclone.org/swift/)
• OpenDrive (https://rclone.org/opendrive/)
• Oracle Object Storage (https://rclone.org/oracleobjectstorage/)
• Pcloud (https://rclone.org/pcloud/)
• PikPak (https://rclone.org/pikpak/)
• Pixeldrain (https://rclone.org/pixeldrain/)
• premiumize.me (https://rclone.org/premiumizeme/)
• put.io (https://rclone.org/putio/)
• Proton Drive (https://rclone.org/protondrive/)
• QingStor (https://rclone.org/qingstor/)
• Quatrix by Maytech (https://rclone.org/quatrix/)
• rsync.net (https://rclone.org/sftp/#rsync-net)
• Seafile (https://rclone.org/seafile/)
• SFTP (https://rclone.org/sftp/)
• Sia (https://rclone.org/sia/)
• SMB (https://rclone.org/smb/)
• Storj (https://rclone.org/storj/)
• SugarSync (https://rclone.org/sugarsync/)
• Union (https://rclone.org/union/)
• Uloz.to (https://rclone.org/ulozto/)
• Uptobox (https://rclone.org/uptobox/)
• WebDAV (https://rclone.org/webdav/)
• Yandex Disk (https://rclone.org/yandex/)
• Zoho WorkDrive (https://rclone.org/zoho/)
• The local filesystem (https://rclone.org/local/)

Rclone syncs a directory tree from one storage system to another.

Its syntax is like this

rclone subcommand [options] <parameters> <parameters...>

A subcommand is a the rclone operation required, (e.g. sync, copy, ls).

An option is a single letter flag (e.g. -v) or a group of single letter flags (e.g. -Pv) or a long flag (e.g. --progress). No options are required. Options can come after the subcommand or in between parameters too or on the end, but only global options can be used before the subcommand. Anything after a -- option will not be interpreted as an option so if you need to add a parameter which starts with a - then put a -- on its own first, eg

rclone lsf -- -directory-starting-with-dash

A parameter is usually a file path or rclone remote, eg /path/to/file or remote:path/to/file but it can be other things - the subcommand help will tell you what.

Source and destination paths are specified by the name you gave the storage system in the config file then the sub path, e.g. "drive:myfolder" to look at "myfolder" in Google drive.

You can define as many storage paths as you like in the config file.

Please use the --interactive/-i flag while learning rclone to avoid accidental data loss.

rclone uses a system of subcommands. For example

rclone ls remote:path # lists a remote
rclone copy /local/path remote:path # copies /local/path to the remote
rclone sync --interactive /local/path remote:path # syncs /local/path to the remote

Enter an interactive configuration session where you can setup new remotes and manage existing ones. You may also set or remove a password to protect your configuration.

rclone config [flags]

  -h, --help   help for config

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.
• rclone config create (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_create/) - Create a new remote with name, type and options.
• rclone config delete (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_delete/) - Delete an existing remote.
• rclone config disconnect (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_disconnect/) - Disconnects user from remote
• rclone config dump (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_dump/) - Dump the config file as JSON.
• rclone config edit (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_edit/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.
• rclone config encryption (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption/) - set, remove and check the encryption for the config file
• rclone config file (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_file/) - Show path of configuration file in use.
• rclone config password (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_password/) - Update password in an existing remote.
• rclone config paths (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_paths/) - Show paths used for configuration, cache, temp etc.
• rclone config providers (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_providers/) - List in JSON format all the providers and options.
• rclone config reconnect (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_reconnect/) - Re-authenticates user with remote.
• rclone config redacted (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_redacted/) - Print redacted (decrypted) config file, or the redacted config for a single remote.
• rclone config show (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_show/) - Print (decrypted) config file, or the config for a single remote.
• rclone config touch (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_touch/) - Ensure configuration file exists.
• rclone config update (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_update/) - Update options in an existing remote.
• rclone config userinfo (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_userinfo/) - Prints info about logged in user of remote.

Copy the source to the destination. Does not transfer files that are identical on source and destination, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Doesn't delete files from the destination. If you want to also delete files from destination, to make it match source, use the sync (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sync/) command instead.

Note that it is always the contents of the directory that is synced, not the directory itself. So when source:path is a directory, it's the contents of source:path that are copied, not the directory name and contents.

To copy single files, use the copyto (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copyto/) command instead.

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.

See the --no-traverse (https://rclone.org/docs/#no-traverse) option for controlling whether rclone lists the destination directory or not. Supplying this option when copying a small number of files into a large destination can speed transfers up greatly.

For example, if you have many files in /path/to/src but only a few of them change every day, you can copy all the files which have changed recently very efficiently like this:

rclone copy --max-age 24h --no-traverse /path/to/src remote:

Rclone will sync the modification times of files and directories if the backend supports it. If metadata syncing is required then use the --metadata flag.

Note that the modification time and metadata for the root directory will not be synced. See https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/7652 for more info.

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics.

Note: Use the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag to test without copying anything.

rclone copy source:path dest:path [flags]

      --create-empty-src-dirs   Create empty source dirs on destination after copy
  -h, --help                    help for copy

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Sync the source to the destination, changing the destination only. Doesn't transfer files that are identical on source and destination, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Destination is updated to match source, including deleting files if necessary (except duplicate objects, see below). If you don't want to delete files from destination, use the copy (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/) command instead.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

rclone sync --interactive SOURCE remote:DESTINATION

Note that files in the destination won't be deleted if there were any errors at any point. Duplicate objects (files with the same name, on those providers that support it) are also not yet handled.

It is always the contents of the directory that is synced, not the directory itself. 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 (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/) command if unsure.

If dest:path doesn't exist, it is created and the source:path contents go there.

It is not possible to sync overlapping remotes. However, you may exclude the destination from the sync with a filter rule or by putting an exclude-if-present file inside the destination directory and sync to a destination that is inside the source directory.

Rclone will sync the modification times of files and directories if the backend supports it. If metadata syncing is required then use the --metadata flag.

Note that the modification time and metadata for the root directory will not be synced. See https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/7652 for more info.

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics

Note: Use the rclone dedupe command to deal with "Duplicate object/directory found in source/destination - ignoring" errors. See this forum post (https://forum.rclone.org/t/sync-not-clearing-duplicates/14372) for more info.

      --absolute                Put a leading / in front of path names
      --combined string         Make a combined report of changes to this file
      --create-empty-src-dirs   Create empty source dirs on destination after sync
      --csv                     Output in CSV format
      --dest-after string       Report all files that exist on the dest post-sync
      --differ string           Report all non-matching files to this file
  -d, --dir-slash               Append a slash to directory names (default true)
      --dirs-only               Only list directories
      --error string            Report all files with errors (hashing or reading) to this file
      --files-only              Only list files (default true)
  -F, --format string           Output format - see lsf help for details (default "p")
      --hash h                  Use this hash when h is used in the format MD5|SHA-1|DropboxHash (default "md5")
  -h, --help                    help for sync
      --match string            Report all matching files to this file
      --missing-on-dst string   Report all files missing from the destination to this file
      --missing-on-src string   Report all files missing from the source to this file
  -s, --separator string        Separator for the items in the format (default ";")
  -t, --timeformat string       Specify a custom time format, or 'max' for max precision supported by remote (default: 2006-01-02 15:04:05)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Flags used for sync commands

      --backup-dir string               Make backups into hierarchy based in DIR
      --delete-after                    When synchronizing, delete files on destination after transferring (default)
      --delete-before                   When synchronizing, delete files on destination before transferring
      --delete-during                   When synchronizing, delete files during transfer
      --fix-case                        Force rename of case insensitive dest to match source
      --ignore-errors                   Delete even if there are I/O errors
      --max-delete int                  When synchronizing, limit the number of deletes (default -1)
      --max-delete-size SizeSuffix      When synchronizing, limit the total size of deletes (default off)
      --suffix string                   Suffix to add to changed files
      --suffix-keep-extension           Preserve the extension when using --suffix
      --track-renames                   When synchronizing, track file renames and do a server-side move if possible
      --track-renames-strategy string   Strategies to use when synchronizing using track-renames hash|modtime|leaf (default "hash")

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Moves the contents of the source directory to the destination directory. Rclone will error if the source and destination overlap and the remote does not support a server-side directory move operation.

To move single files, use the moveto (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_moveto/) command instead.

If no filters are in use and if possible this will server-side move source:path into dest:path. After this source:path will no longer exist.

Otherwise for each file in source:path selected by the filters (if any) this will move it into dest:path. If possible a server-side move will be used, otherwise it will copy it (server-side if possible) into dest:path then delete the original (if no errors on copy) in source:path.

If you want to delete empty source directories after move, use the --delete-empty-src-dirs flag.

See the --no-traverse (https://rclone.org/docs/#no-traverse) option for controlling whether rclone lists the destination directory or not. Supplying this option when moving a small number of files into a large destination can speed transfers up greatly.

Rclone will sync the modification times of files and directories if the backend supports it. If metadata syncing is required then use the --metadata flag.

Note that the modification time and metadata for the root directory will not be synced. See https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/7652 for more info.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics.

rclone move source:path dest:path [flags]

      --create-empty-src-dirs   Create empty source dirs on destination after move
      --delete-empty-src-dirs   Delete empty source dirs after move
  -h, --help                    help for move

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Remove the files in path. Unlike purge (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_purge/) it obeys include/exclude filters so can be used to selectively delete files.

rclone delete only deletes files but leaves the directory structure alone. If you want to delete a directory and all of its contents use the purge (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_purge/) command.

If you supply the --rmdirs flag, it will remove all empty directories along with it. You can also use the separate command rmdir (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdir/) or rmdirs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdirs/) to delete empty directories only.

For example, to delete all files bigger than 100 MiB, you may first want to check what would be deleted (use either):

rclone --min-size 100M lsl remote:path
rclone --dry-run --min-size 100M delete remote:path

Then proceed with the actual delete:

rclone --min-size 100M delete remote:path

That reads "delete everything with a minimum size of 100 MiB", hence delete all files bigger than 100 MiB.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

rclone delete remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help     help for delete
      --rmdirs   rmdirs removes empty directories but leaves root intact

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Remove the path and all of its contents. Note that this does not obey include/exclude filters - everything will be removed. Use the delete (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_delete/) command if you want to selectively delete files. To delete empty directories only, use command rmdir (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdir/) or rmdirs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdirs/).

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

rclone purge remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for purge

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

  -h, --help   help for mkdir

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This removes empty directory given by path. Will not remove the path if it has any objects in it, not even empty subdirectories. Use command rmdirs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdirs/) (or delete (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_delete/) with option --rmdirs) to do that.

To delete a path and any objects in it, use purge (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_purge/) command.

rclone rmdir remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for rmdir

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Checks the files in the source and destination match. It compares sizes and hashes (MD5 or SHA1) and logs a report of files that don't match. It doesn't alter the source or destination.

For the crypt (https://rclone.org/crypt/) remote there is a dedicated command, cryptcheck (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_cryptcheck/), that are able to check the checksums of the encrypted files.

If you supply the --size-only flag, it will only compare the sizes not the hashes as well. Use this for a quick check.

If you supply the --download flag, it will download the data from both remotes and check them against each other on the fly. This can be useful for remotes that don't support hashes or if you really want to check all the data.

If you supply the --checkfile HASH flag with a valid hash name, the source:path must point to a text file in the SUM format.

If you supply the --one-way flag, it will only check that files in the source match the files in the destination, not the other way around. This means that extra files in the destination that are not in the source will not be detected.

The --differ, --missing-on-dst, --missing-on-src, --match and --error flags write paths, one per line, to the file name (or stdout if it is -) supplied. What they write is described in the help below. For example --differ will write all paths which are present on both the source and destination but different.

The --combined flag will write a file (or stdout) which contains all file paths with a symbol and then a space and then the path to tell you what happened to it. These are reminiscent of diff files.

• = path means path was found in source and destination and was identical
• `- path` means path was missing on the source, so only in the destination
• `+ path` means path was missing on the destination, so only in the source
• `* path` means path was present in source and destination but different.
• ! path means there was an error reading or hashing the source or dest.

The default number of parallel checks is 8. See the --checkers=N (https://rclone.org/docs/#checkers-n) option for more information.

rclone check source:path dest:path [flags]

  -C, --checkfile string        Treat source:path as a SUM file with hashes of given type
      --combined string         Make a combined report of changes to this file
      --differ string           Report all non-matching files to this file
      --download                Check by downloading rather than with hash
      --error string            Report all files with errors (hashing or reading) to this file
  -h, --help                    help for check
      --match string            Report all matching files to this file
      --missing-on-dst string   Report all files missing from the destination to this file
      --missing-on-src string   Report all files missing from the source to this file
      --one-way                 Check one way only, source files must exist on remote

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags used for check commands

      --max-backlog int   Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Lists the objects in the source path to standard output in a human readable format with size and path. Recurses by default.

Eg

$ rclone ls swift:bucket
    60295 bevajer5jef
    90613 canole
    94467 diwogej7
    37600 fubuwic

Any of the filtering options can be applied to this command.

There are several related list commands

• ls to list size and path of objects only
• lsl to list modification time, size and path of objects only
• lsd to list directories only
• lsf to list objects and directories in easy to parse format
• lsjson to list objects and directories in JSON format

ls,lsl,lsd are designed to be human-readable. lsf is designed to be human and machine-readable. lsjson is designed to be machine-readable.

Note that ls and lsl recurse by default - use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

The other list commands lsd,lsf,lsjson do not recurse by default - use -R to make them recurse.

Listing a nonexistent directory will produce an error except for remotes which can't have empty directories (e.g. s3, swift, or gcs - the bucket-based remotes).

rclone ls remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for ls

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Lists the directories in the source path to standard output. Does not recurse by default. Use the -R flag to recurse.

This command lists the total size of the directory (if known, -1 if not), the modification time (if known, the current time if not), the number of objects in the directory (if known, -1 if not) and the name of the directory, Eg

$ rclone lsd swift:
      494000 2018-04-26 08:43:20     10000 10000files
          65 2018-04-26 08:43:20         1 1File

Or

$ rclone lsd drive:test
          -1 2016-10-17 17:41:53        -1 1000files
          -1 2017-01-03 14:40:54        -1 2500files
          -1 2017-07-08 14:39:28        -1 4000files

If you just want the directory names use rclone lsf --dirs-only.

Any of the filtering options can be applied to this command.

There are several related list commands

• ls to list size and path of objects only
• lsl to list modification time, size and path of objects only
• lsd to list directories only
• lsf to list objects and directories in easy to parse format
• lsjson to list objects and directories in JSON format

ls,lsl,lsd are designed to be human-readable. lsf is designed to be human and machine-readable. lsjson is designed to be machine-readable.

Note that ls and lsl recurse by default - use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

The other list commands lsd,lsf,lsjson do not recurse by default - use -R to make them recurse.

Listing a nonexistent directory will produce an error except for remotes which can't have empty directories (e.g. s3, swift, or gcs - the bucket-based remotes).

rclone lsd remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help        help for lsd
  -R, --recursive   Recurse into the listing

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Lists the objects in the source path to standard output in a human readable format with modification time, size and path. Recurses by default.

Eg

$ rclone lsl swift:bucket
    60295 2016-06-25 18:55:41.062626927 bevajer5jef
    90613 2016-06-25 18:55:43.302607074 canole
    94467 2016-06-25 18:55:43.046609333 diwogej7
    37600 2016-06-25 18:55:40.814629136 fubuwic

Any of the filtering options can be applied to this command.

There are several related list commands

• ls to list size and path of objects only
• lsl to list modification time, size and path of objects only
• lsd to list directories only
• lsf to list objects and directories in easy to parse format
• lsjson to list objects and directories in JSON format

ls,lsl,lsd are designed to be human-readable. lsf is designed to be human and machine-readable. lsjson is designed to be machine-readable.

Note that ls and lsl recurse by default - use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

The other list commands lsd,lsf,lsjson do not recurse by default - use -R to make them recurse.

Listing a nonexistent directory will produce an error except for remotes which can't have empty directories (e.g. s3, swift, or gcs - the bucket-based remotes).

rclone lsl remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for lsl

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Produces an md5sum file for all the objects in the path. This is in the same format as the standard md5sum tool produces.

By default, the hash is requested from the remote. If MD5 is not supported by the remote, no hash will be returned. With the download flag, the file will be downloaded from the remote and hashed locally enabling MD5 for any remote.

For other algorithms, see the hashsum (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_hashsum/) command. Running rclone md5sum remote:path is equivalent to running rclone hashsum MD5 remote:path.

This command can also hash data received on standard input (stdin), by not passing a remote:path, or by passing a hyphen as remote:path when there is data to read (if not, the hyphen will be treated literally, as a relative path).

rclone md5sum remote:path [flags]

      --base64               Output base64 encoded hashsum
  -C, --checkfile string     Validate hashes against a given SUM file instead of printing them
      --download             Download the file and hash it locally; if this flag is not specified, the hash is requested from the remote
  -h, --help                 help for md5sum
      --output-file string   Output hashsums to a file rather than the terminal

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

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

By default, the hash is requested from the remote. If SHA-1 is not supported by the remote, no hash will be returned. With the download flag, the file will be downloaded from the remote and hashed locally enabling SHA-1 for any remote.

For other algorithms, see the hashsum (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_hashsum/) command. Running rclone sha1sum remote:path is equivalent to running rclone hashsum SHA1 remote:path.

This command can also hash data received on standard input (stdin), by not passing a remote:path, or by passing a hyphen as remote:path when there is data to read (if not, the hyphen will be treated literally, as a relative path).

This command can also hash data received on STDIN, if not passing a remote:path.

rclone sha1sum remote:path [flags]

      --base64               Output base64 encoded hashsum
  -C, --checkfile string     Validate hashes against a given SUM file instead of printing them
      --download             Download the file and hash it locally; if this flag is not specified, the hash is requested from the remote
  -h, --help                 help for sha1sum
      --output-file string   Output hashsums to a file rather than the terminal

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Counts objects in the path and calculates the total size. Prints the result to standard output.

By default the output is in human-readable format, but shows values in both human-readable format as well as the raw numbers (global option --human-readable is not considered). Use option --json to format output as JSON instead.

Recurses by default, use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

Some backends do not always provide file sizes, see for example Google Photos (https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#size) and Google Docs (https://rclone.org/drive/#limitations-of-google-docs). Rclone will then show a notice in the log indicating how many such files were encountered, and count them in as empty files in the output of the size command.

rclone size remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for size
      --json   Format output as JSON

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Show the rclone version number, the go version, the build target OS and architecture, the runtime OS and kernel version and bitness, build tags and the type of executable (static or dynamic).

For example:

$ rclone version
rclone v1.55.0
- os/version: ubuntu 18.04 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 4.15.0-136-generic (x86_64)
- os/type: linux
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.16
- go/linking: static
- go/tags: none

Note: before rclone version 1.55 the os/type and os/arch lines were merged, and the "go/version" line was tagged as "go version".

If you supply the --check flag, then it will do an online check to compare your version with the latest release and the latest beta.

$ rclone version --check
yours:  1.42.0.6
latest: 1.42          (released 2018-06-16)
beta:   1.42.0.5      (released 2018-06-17)

Or

$ rclone version --check
yours:  1.41
latest: 1.42          (released 2018-06-16)
  upgrade: https://downloads.rclone.org/v1.42
beta:   1.42.0.5      (released 2018-06-17)
  upgrade: https://beta.rclone.org/v1.42-005-g56e1e820

rclone version [flags]

      --check   Check for new version
  -h, --help    help for version

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Clean up the remote if possible. Empty the trash or delete old file versions. Not supported by all remotes.

rclone cleanup remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for cleanup

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

By default dedupe interactively finds files with duplicate names and offers to delete all but one or rename them to be different. This is known as deduping by name.

Deduping by name is only useful with a small group of backends (e.g. Google Drive, Opendrive) that can have duplicate file names. It can be run on wrapping backends (e.g. crypt) if they wrap a backend which supports duplicate file names.

However if --by-hash is passed in then dedupe will find files with duplicate hashes instead which will work on any backend which supports at least one hash. This can be used to find files with duplicate content. This is known as deduping by hash.

If deduping by name, first rclone will merge directories with the same name. It will do this iteratively until all the identically named directories have been merged.

Next, if deduping by name, for every group of duplicate file names / hashes, it will delete all but one identical file it finds without confirmation. This means that for most duplicated files the dedupe command will not be interactive.

dedupe considers files to be identical if they have the same file path and the same hash. If the backend does not support hashes (e.g. crypt wrapping Google Drive) then they will never be found to be identical. If you use the --size-only flag then files will be considered identical if they have the same size (any hash will be ignored). This can be useful on crypt backends which do not support hashes.

Next rclone will resolve the remaining duplicates. Exactly which action is taken depends on the dedupe mode. By default, rclone will interactively query the user for each one.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

Here is an example run.

Before - with duplicates

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:11.775000000 one.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:23:06.731000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:18:26.092000000 one.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000 two.txt
  1744073 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000 two.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000 two.txt

Now the dedupe session

$ rclone dedupe drive:dupes
2016/03/05 16:24:37 Google drive root 'dupes': Looking for duplicates using interactive mode.
one.txt: Found 4 files with duplicate names
one.txt: Deleting 2/3 identical duplicates (MD5 "1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36")
one.txt: 2 duplicates remain
  1:      6048320 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000, MD5 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
  2:       564374 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:23:06.731000000, MD5 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
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> 1
one.txt: Deleted 1 extra copies
two.txt: Found 3 files with duplicate names
two.txt: 3 duplicates remain
  1:       564374 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000, MD5 7594e7dc9fc28f727c42ee3e0749de81
  2:      6048320 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000, MD5 1eedaa9fe86fd4b8632e2ac549403b36
  3:      1744073 bytes, 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000, MD5 851957f7fb6f0bc4ce76be966d336802
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

The result being

$ rclone lsl drive:dupes
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:23:16.798000000 one.txt
   564374 2016-03-05 16:22:52.118000000 two-1.txt
  6048320 2016-03-05 16:22:46.185000000 two-2.txt
  1744073 2016-03-05 16:22:38.104000000 two-3.txt

Dedupe can be run non interactively using the --dedupe-mode flag or by using an extra parameter with the same value

• --dedupe-mode interactive - interactive as above.
• --dedupe-mode skip - removes identical files then skips anything left.
• --dedupe-mode first - removes identical files then keeps the first one.
• --dedupe-mode newest - removes identical files then keeps the newest one.
• --dedupe-mode oldest - removes identical files then keeps the oldest one.
• --dedupe-mode largest - removes identical files then keeps the largest one.
• --dedupe-mode smallest - removes identical files then keeps the smallest one.
• --dedupe-mode rename - removes identical files then renames the rest to be different.
• --dedupe-mode list - lists duplicate dirs and files only and changes nothing.

For example, to rename all the identically named photos in your Google Photos directory, do

rclone dedupe --dedupe-mode rename "drive:Google Photos"

Or

rclone dedupe rename "drive:Google Photos"

rclone dedupe [mode] remote:path [flags]

      --by-hash              Find identical hashes rather than names
      --dedupe-mode string   Dedupe mode interactive|skip|first|newest|oldest|largest|smallest|rename (default "interactive")
  -h, --help                 help for dedupe

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Prints quota information about a remote to standard output. The output is typically used, free, quota and trash contents.

E.g. Typical output from rclone about remote: is:

Total:   17 GiB
Used:    7.444 GiB
Free:    1.315 GiB
Trashed: 100.000 MiB
Other:   8.241 GiB

Where the fields are:

• Total: Total size available.
• Used: Total size used.
• Free: Total space available to this user.
• Trashed: Total space used by trash.
• Other: Total amount in other storage (e.g. Gmail, Google Photos).
• Objects: Total number of objects in the storage.

All sizes are in number of bytes.

Applying a --full flag to the command prints the bytes in full, e.g.

Total:   18253611008
Used:    7993453766
Free:    1411001220
Trashed: 104857602
Other:   8849156022

A --json flag generates conveniently machine-readable output, e.g.

{
    "total": 18253611008,
    "used": 7993453766,
    "trashed": 104857602,
    "other": 8849156022,
    "free": 1411001220
}

Not all backends print all fields. Information is not included if it is not provided by a backend. Where the value is unlimited it is omitted.

Some backends does not support the rclone about command at all, see complete list in documentation (https://rclone.org/overview/#optional-features).

rclone about remote: [flags]

      --full   Full numbers instead of human-readable
  -h, --help   help for about
      --json   Format output as JSON

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Remote authorization. Used to authorize a remote or headless rclone from a machine with a browser - use as instructed by rclone config.

Use --auth-no-open-browser to prevent rclone to open auth link in default browser automatically.

Use --template to generate HTML output via a custom Go template. If a blank string is provided as an argument to this flag, the default template is used.

rclone authorize [flags]

      --auth-no-open-browser   Do not automatically open auth link in default browser
  -h, --help                   help for authorize
      --template string        The path to a custom Go template for generating HTML responses

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This runs a backend-specific command. The commands themselves (except for "help" and "features") are defined by the backends and you should see the backend docs for definitions.

You can discover what commands a backend implements by using

rclone backend help remote:
rclone backend help <backendname>

You can also discover information about the backend using (see operations/fsinfo (https://rclone.org/rc/#operations-fsinfo) in the remote control docs for more info).

rclone backend features remote:

Pass options to the backend command with -o. This should be key=value or key, e.g.:

rclone backend stats remote:path stats -o format=json -o long

Pass arguments to the backend by placing them on the end of the line

rclone backend cleanup remote:path file1 file2 file3

Note to run these commands on a running backend then see backend/command (https://rclone.org/rc/#backend-command) in the rc docs.

rclone backend <command> remote:path [opts] <args> [flags]

  -h, --help                 help for backend
      --json                 Always output in JSON format
  -o, --option stringArray   Option in the form name=value or name

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Perform bidirectional synchronization between two paths.

Bisync (https://rclone.org/bisync/) provides a bidirectional cloud sync solution in rclone. It retains the Path1 and Path2 filesystem listings from the prior run. On each successive run it will: - list files on Path1 and Path2, and check for changes on each side. Changes include New, Newer, Older, and Deleted files. - Propagate changes on Path1 to Path2, and vice-versa.

Bisync is in beta and is considered an advanced command, so use with care. Make sure you have read and understood the entire manual (https://rclone.org/bisync) (especially the Limitations (https://rclone.org/bisync/#limitations) section) before using, or data loss can result. Questions can be asked in the Rclone Forum (https://forum.rclone.org/).

See full bisync description (https://rclone.org/bisync/) for details.

rclone bisync remote1:path1 remote2:path2 [flags]

      --backup-dir1 string                   --backup-dir for Path1. Must be a non-overlapping path on the same remote.
      --backup-dir2 string                   --backup-dir for Path2. Must be a non-overlapping path on the same remote.
      --check-access                         Ensure expected RCLONE_TEST files are found on both Path1 and Path2 filesystems, else abort.
      --check-filename string                Filename for --check-access (default: RCLONE_TEST)
      --check-sync string                    Controls comparison of final listings: true|false|only (default: true) (default "true")
      --compare string                       Comma-separated list of bisync-specific compare options ex. 'size,modtime,checksum' (default: 'size,modtime')
      --conflict-loser ConflictLoserAction   Action to take on the loser of a sync conflict (when there is a winner) or on both files (when there is no winner): , num, pathname, delete (default: num)
      --conflict-resolve string              Automatically resolve conflicts by preferring the version that is: none, path1, path2, newer, older, larger, smaller (default: none) (default "none")
      --conflict-suffix string               Suffix to use when renaming a --conflict-loser. Can be either one string or two comma-separated strings to assign different suffixes to Path1/Path2. (default: 'conflict')
      --create-empty-src-dirs                Sync creation and deletion of empty directories. (Not compatible with --remove-empty-dirs)
      --download-hash                        Compute hash by downloading when otherwise unavailable. (warning: may be slow and use lots of data!)
      --filters-file string                  Read filtering patterns from a file
      --force                                Bypass --max-delete safety check and run the sync. Consider using with --verbose
  -h, --help                                 help for bisync
      --ignore-listing-checksum              Do not use checksums for listings (add --ignore-checksum to additionally skip post-copy checksum checks)
      --max-lock Duration                    Consider lock files older than this to be expired (default: 0 (never expire)) (minimum: 2m) (default 0s)
      --no-cleanup                           Retain working files (useful for troubleshooting and testing).
      --no-slow-hash                         Ignore listing checksums only on backends where they are slow
      --recover                              Automatically recover from interruptions without requiring --resync.
      --remove-empty-dirs                    Remove ALL empty directories at the final cleanup step.
      --resilient                            Allow future runs to retry after certain less-serious errors, instead of requiring --resync. Use at your own risk!
  -1, --resync                               Performs the resync run. Equivalent to --resync-mode path1. Consider using --verbose or --dry-run first.
      --resync-mode string                   During resync, prefer the version that is: path1, path2, newer, older, larger, smaller (default: path1 if --resync, otherwise none for no resync.) (default "none")
      --slow-hash-sync-only                  Ignore slow checksums for listings and deltas, but still consider them during sync calls.
      --workdir string                       Use custom working dir - useful for testing. (default: {WORKDIR})

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Sends any files to standard output.

You can use it like this to output a single file

rclone cat remote:path/to/file

Or like this to output any file in dir or its subdirectories.

rclone cat remote:path/to/dir

Or like this to output any .txt files in dir or its subdirectories.

rclone --include "*.txt" cat remote:path/to/dir

Use the --head flag to print characters only at the start, --tail for the end and --offset and --count to print a section in the middle. Note that if offset is negative it will count from the end, so --offset -1 --count 1 is equivalent to --tail 1.

Use the --separator flag to print a separator value between files. Be sure to shell-escape special characters. For example, to print a newline between files, use:

• bash:

  rclone --include "*.txt" --separator $'\n' cat remote:path/to/dir

• powershell:

  rclone --include "*.txt" --separator "`n" cat remote:path/to/dir

  rclone cat remote:path [flags]

      --count int          Only print N characters (default -1)
      --discard            Discard the output instead of printing
      --head int           Only print the first N characters
  -h, --help               help for cat
      --offset int         Start printing at offset N (or from end if -ve)
      --separator string   Separator to use between objects when printing multiple files
      --tail int           Only print the last N characters

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Checks that hashsums of destination files match the SUM file. It compares hashes (MD5, SHA1, etc) and logs a report of files which don't match. It doesn't alter the file system.

The sumfile is treated as the source and the dst:path is treated as the destination for the purposes of the output.

If you supply the --download flag, it will download the data from the remote and calculate the content hash on the fly. This can be useful for remotes that don't support hashes or if you really want to check all the data.

Note that hash values in the SUM file are treated as case insensitive.

If you supply the --one-way flag, it will only check that files in the source match the files in the destination, not the other way around. This means that extra files in the destination that are not in the source will not be detected.

The --differ, --missing-on-dst, --missing-on-src, --match and --error flags write paths, one per line, to the file name (or stdout if it is -) supplied. What they write is described in the help below. For example --differ will write all paths which are present on both the source and destination but different.

The --combined flag will write a file (or stdout) which contains all file paths with a symbol and then a space and then the path to tell you what happened to it. These are reminiscent of diff files.

• = path means path was found in source and destination and was identical
• `- path` means path was missing on the source, so only in the destination
• `+ path` means path was missing on the destination, so only in the source
• `* path` means path was present in source and destination but different.
• ! path means there was an error reading or hashing the source or dest.

The default number of parallel checks is 8. See the --checkers=N (https://rclone.org/docs/#checkers-n) option for more information.

rclone checksum <hash> sumfile dst:path [flags]

      --combined string         Make a combined report of changes to this file
      --differ string           Report all non-matching files to this file
      --download                Check by hashing the contents
      --error string            Report all files with errors (hashing or reading) to this file
  -h, --help                    help for checksum
      --match string            Report all matching files to this file
      --missing-on-dst string   Report all files missing from the destination to this file
      --missing-on-src string   Report all files missing from the source to this file
      --one-way                 Check one way only, source files must exist on remote

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Generates a shell completion script for rclone. Run with --help to list the supported shells.

  -h, --help   help for completion

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.
• rclone completion bash (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion_bash/) - Output bash completion script for rclone.
• rclone completion fish (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion_fish/) - Output fish completion script for rclone.
• rclone completion powershell (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion_powershell/) - Output powershell completion script for rclone.
• rclone completion zsh (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion_zsh/) - Output zsh completion script for rclone.

Generates a bash shell autocompletion script for rclone.

By default, when run without any arguments,

rclone completion bash

the generated script will be written to

/etc/bash_completion.d/rclone

and so rclone will probably need to be run as root, or with sudo.

If you supply a path to a file as the command line argument, then the generated script will be written to that file, in which case you should not need root privileges.

If output_file is "-", then the output will be written to stdout.

If you have installed the script into the default location, you can logout and login again to use the autocompletion script.

Alternatively, you can source the script directly

. /path/to/my_bash_completion_scripts/rclone

and the autocompletion functionality will be added to your current shell.

rclone completion bash [output_file] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for bash

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone completion (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion/) - Output completion script for a given shell.

Generates a fish autocompletion script for rclone.

This writes to /etc/fish/completions/rclone.fish by default so will probably need to be run with sudo or as root, e.g.

sudo rclone completion fish

Logout and login again to use the autocompletion scripts, or source them directly

. /etc/fish/completions/rclone.fish

If you supply a command line argument the script will be written there.

If output_file is "-", then the output will be written to stdout.

rclone completion fish [output_file] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for fish

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone completion (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion/) - Output completion script for a given shell.

Generate the autocompletion script for powershell.

To load completions in your current shell session:

rclone completion powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression

To load completions for every new session, add the output of the above command to your powershell profile.

If output_file is "-" or missing, then the output will be written to stdout.

rclone completion powershell [output_file] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for powershell

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone completion (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion/) - Output completion script for a given shell.

Generates a zsh autocompletion script for rclone.

This writes to /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_rclone by default so will probably need to be run with sudo or as root, e.g.

sudo rclone completion zsh

Logout and login again to use the autocompletion scripts, or source them directly

autoload -U compinit && compinit

If you supply a command line argument the script will be written there.

If output_file is "-", then the output will be written to stdout.

rclone completion zsh [output_file] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for zsh

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone completion (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_completion/) - Output completion script for a given shell.

Create a new remote of name with type and options. The options should be passed in pairs of key value or as key=value.

For example, to make a swift remote of name myremote using auto config you would do:

rclone config create myremote swift env_auth true
rclone config create myremote swift env_auth=true

So for example if you wanted to configure a Google Drive remote but using remote authorization you would do this:

rclone config create mydrive drive config_is_local=false

Note that if the config process would normally ask a question the default is taken (unless --non-interactive is used). Each time that happens rclone will print or DEBUG a message saying how to affect the value taken.

If any of the parameters passed is a password field, then rclone will automatically obscure them if they aren't already obscured before putting them in the config file.

NB If the password parameter is 22 characters or longer and consists only of base64 characters then rclone can get confused about whether the password is already obscured or not and put unobscured passwords into the config file. If you want to be 100% certain that the passwords get obscured then use the --obscure flag, or if you are 100% certain you are already passing obscured passwords then use --no-obscure. You can also set obscured passwords using the rclone config password command.

The flag --non-interactive is for use by applications that wish to configure rclone themselves, rather than using rclone's text based configuration questions. If this flag is set, and rclone needs to ask the user a question, a JSON blob will be returned with the question in it.

This will look something like (some irrelevant detail removed):

{
    "State": "*oauth-islocal,teamdrive,,",
    "Option": {
        "Name": "config_is_local",
        "Help": "Use web browser to automatically authenticate rclone with remote?\n * Say Y if the machine running rclone has a web browser you can use\n * Say N if running rclone on a (remote) machine without web browser access\nIf not sure try Y. If Y failed, try N.\n",
        "Default": true,
        "Examples": [
            {
                "Value": "true",
                "Help": "Yes"
            },
            {
                "Value": "false",
                "Help": "No"
            }
        ],
        "Required": false,
        "IsPassword": false,
        "Type": "bool",
        "Exclusive": true,
    },
    "Error": "",
}

The format of Option is the same as returned by rclone config providers. The question should be asked to the user and returned to rclone as the --result option along with the --state parameter.

The keys of Option are used as follows:

• Name - name of variable - show to user
• Help - help text. Hard wrapped at 80 chars. Any URLs should be clicky.
• Default - default value - return this if the user just wants the default.
• Examples - the user should be able to choose one of these
• Required - the value should be non-empty
• IsPassword - the value is a password and should be edited as such
• Type - type of value, eg bool, string, int and others
• Exclusive - if set no free-form entry allowed only the Examples
• Irrelevant keys Provider, ShortOpt, Hide, NoPrefix, Advanced

If Error is set then it should be shown to the user at the same time as the question.

rclone config update name --continue --state "*oauth-islocal,teamdrive,," --result "true"

Note that when using --continue all passwords should be passed in the clear (not obscured). Any default config values should be passed in with each invocation of --continue.

At the end of the non interactive process, rclone will return a result with State as empty string.

If --all is passed then rclone will ask all the config questions, not just the post config questions. Any parameters are used as defaults for questions as usual.

Note that bin/config.py in the rclone source implements this protocol as a readable demonstration.

rclone config create name type [key value]* [flags]

      --all               Ask the full set of config questions
      --continue          Continue the configuration process with an answer
  -h, --help              help for create
      --no-obscure        Force any passwords not to be obscured
      --non-interactive   Don't interact with user and return questions
      --obscure           Force any passwords to be obscured
      --result string     Result - use with --continue
      --state string      State - use with --continue

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for delete

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

This disconnects the remote: passed in to the cloud storage system.

This normally means revoking the oauth token.

To reconnect use "rclone config reconnect".

rclone config disconnect remote: [flags]

  -h, --help   help for disconnect

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for dump

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

Enter an interactive configuration session where you can setup new remotes and manage existing ones. You may also set or remove a password to protect your configuration.

rclone config edit [flags]

  -h, --help   help for edit

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

This command sets, clears and checks the encryption for the config file using the subcommands below.

  -h, --help   help for encryption

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.
• rclone config encryption check (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption_check/) - Check that the config file is encrypted
• rclone config encryption remove (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption_remove/) - Remove the config file encryption password
• rclone config encryption set (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption_set/) - Set or change the config file encryption password

This checks the config file is encrypted and that you can decrypt it.

It will attempt to decrypt the config using the password you supply.

If decryption fails it will return a non-zero exit code if using --password-command, otherwise it will prompt again for the password.

If the config file is not encrypted it will return a non zero exit code.

rclone config encryption check [flags]

  -h, --help   help for check

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config encryption (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption/) - set, remove and check the encryption for the config file

Remove the config file encryption password

This removes the config file encryption, returning it to un-encrypted.

If --password-command is in use, this will be called to supply the old config password.

If the config was not encrypted then no error will be returned and this command will do nothing.

rclone config encryption remove [flags]

  -h, --help   help for remove

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config encryption (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption/) - set, remove and check the encryption for the config file

This command sets or changes the config file encryption password.

If there was no config password set then it sets a new one, otherwise it changes the existing config password.

Note that if you are changing an encryption password using --password-command then this will be called once to decrypt the config using the old password and then again to read the new password to re-encrypt the config.

When --password-command is called to change the password then the environment variable RCLONE_PASSWORD_CHANGE=1 will be set. So if changing passwords programatically you can use the environment variable to distinguish which password you must supply.

Alternatively you can remove the password first (with rclone config encryption remove), then set it again with this command which may be easier if you don't mind the unecrypted config file being on the disk briefly.

rclone config encryption set [flags]

  -h, --help   help for set

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config encryption (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config_encryption/) - set, remove and check the encryption for the config file

  -h, --help   help for file

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

Update an existing remote's password. The password should be passed in pairs of key password or as key=password. The password should be passed in in clear (unobscured).

For example, to set password of a remote of name myremote you would do:

rclone config password myremote fieldname mypassword
rclone config password myremote fieldname=mypassword

This command is obsolete now that "config update" and "config create" both support obscuring passwords directly.

rclone config password name [key value]+ [flags]

  -h, --help   help for password

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for paths

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for providers

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

This reconnects remote: passed in to the cloud storage system.

To disconnect the remote use "rclone config disconnect".

This normally means going through the interactive oauth flow again.

rclone config reconnect remote: [flags]

  -h, --help   help for reconnect

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

This prints a redacted copy of the config file, either the whole config file or for a given remote.

The config file will be redacted by replacing all passwords and other sensitive info with XXX.

This makes the config file suitable for posting online for support.

It should be double checked before posting as the redaction may not be perfect.

rclone config redacted [<remote>] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for redacted

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for show

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

  -h, --help   help for touch

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

Update an existing remote's options. The options should be passed in pairs of key value or as key=value.

For example, to update the env_auth field of a remote of name myremote you would do:

rclone config update myremote env_auth true
rclone config update myremote env_auth=true

If the remote uses OAuth the token will be updated, if you don't require this add an extra parameter thus:

rclone config update myremote env_auth=true config_refresh_token=false

Note that if the config process would normally ask a question the default is taken (unless --non-interactive is used). Each time that happens rclone will print or DEBUG a message saying how to affect the value taken.

If any of the parameters passed is a password field, then rclone will automatically obscure them if they aren't already obscured before putting them in the config file.

NB If the password parameter is 22 characters or longer and consists only of base64 characters then rclone can get confused about whether the password is already obscured or not and put unobscured passwords into the config file. If you want to be 100% certain that the passwords get obscured then use the --obscure flag, or if you are 100% certain you are already passing obscured passwords then use --no-obscure. You can also set obscured passwords using the rclone config password command.

The flag --non-interactive is for use by applications that wish to configure rclone themselves, rather than using rclone's text based configuration questions. If this flag is set, and rclone needs to ask the user a question, a JSON blob will be returned with the question in it.

This will look something like (some irrelevant detail removed):

{
    "State": "*oauth-islocal,teamdrive,,",
    "Option": {
        "Name": "config_is_local",
        "Help": "Use web browser to automatically authenticate rclone with remote?\n * Say Y if the machine running rclone has a web browser you can use\n * Say N if running rclone on a (remote) machine without web browser access\nIf not sure try Y. If Y failed, try N.\n",
        "Default": true,
        "Examples": [
            {
                "Value": "true",
                "Help": "Yes"
            },
            {
                "Value": "false",
                "Help": "No"
            }
        ],
        "Required": false,
        "IsPassword": false,
        "Type": "bool",
        "Exclusive": true,
    },
    "Error": "",
}

The format of Option is the same as returned by rclone config providers. The question should be asked to the user and returned to rclone as the --result option along with the --state parameter.

The keys of Option are used as follows:

• Name - name of variable - show to user
• Help - help text. Hard wrapped at 80 chars. Any URLs should be clicky.
• Default - default value - return this if the user just wants the default.
• Examples - the user should be able to choose one of these
• Required - the value should be non-empty
• IsPassword - the value is a password and should be edited as such
• Type - type of value, eg bool, string, int and others
• Exclusive - if set no free-form entry allowed only the Examples
• Irrelevant keys Provider, ShortOpt, Hide, NoPrefix, Advanced

If Error is set then it should be shown to the user at the same time as the question.

rclone config update name --continue --state "*oauth-islocal,teamdrive,," --result "true"

Note that when using --continue all passwords should be passed in the clear (not obscured). Any default config values should be passed in with each invocation of --continue.

At the end of the non interactive process, rclone will return a result with State as empty string.

If --all is passed then rclone will ask all the config questions, not just the post config questions. Any parameters are used as defaults for questions as usual.

Note that bin/config.py in the rclone source implements this protocol as a readable demonstration.

rclone config update name [key value]+ [flags]

      --all               Ask the full set of config questions
      --continue          Continue the configuration process with an answer
  -h, --help              help for update
      --no-obscure        Force any passwords not to be obscured
      --non-interactive   Don't interact with user and return questions
      --obscure           Force any passwords to be obscured
      --result string     Result - use with --continue
      --state string      State - use with --continue

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

This prints the details of the person logged in to the cloud storage system.

rclone config userinfo remote: [flags]

  -h, --help   help for userinfo
      --json   Format output as JSON

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) - Enter an interactive configuration session.

If source:path is a file or directory then it copies it to a file or directory named dest:path.

This can be used to upload single files to other than their current name. If the source is a directory then it acts exactly like the copy (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/) command.

So

rclone copyto src dst

where src and dst are rclone paths, either remote:path or /path/to/local or C:.

This will:

if src is file
    copy it to dst, overwriting an existing file if it exists
if src is directory
    copy it to dst, overwriting existing files if they exist
    see copy command for full details

This doesn't transfer files that are identical on src and dst, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. It doesn't delete files from the destination.

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics

rclone copyto source:path dest:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for copyto

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Download a URL's content and copy it to the destination without saving it in temporary storage.

Setting --auto-filename will attempt to automatically determine the filename from the URL (after any redirections) and used in the destination path.

With --auto-filename-header in addition, if a specific filename is set in HTTP headers, it will be used instead of the name from the URL. With --print-filename in addition, the resulting file name will be printed.

Setting --no-clobber will prevent overwriting file on the destination if there is one with the same name.

Setting --stdout or making the output file name - will cause the output to be written to standard output.

If you can't get rclone copyurl to work then here are some things you can try:

• --disable-http2 rclone will use HTTP2 if available - try disabling it
• --bind 0.0.0.0 rclone will use IPv6 if available - try disabling it
• --bind ::0 to disable IPv4
• --user agent curl - some sites have whitelists for curl's user-agent - try that

• Make sure the site works with curl directly

  rclone copyurl https://example.com dest:path [flags]

  -a, --auto-filename     Get the file name from the URL and use it for destination file path
      --header-filename   Get the file name from the Content-Disposition header
  -h, --help              help for copyurl
      --no-clobber        Prevent overwriting file with same name
  -p, --print-filename    Print the resulting name from --auto-filename
      --stdout            Write the output to stdout rather than a file

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Checks a remote against a crypted (https://rclone.org/crypt/) remote. This is the equivalent of running rclone check (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_check/), but able to check the checksums of the encrypted remote.

For it to work the underlying remote of the cryptedremote must support some kind of checksum.

It works by reading the nonce from each file on the cryptedremote: and using that to encrypt each file on the remote:. It then checks the checksum of the underlying file on the cryptedremote: against the checksum of the file it has just encrypted.

Use it like this

rclone cryptcheck /path/to/files encryptedremote:path

You can use it like this also, but that will involve downloading all the files in remote:path.

rclone cryptcheck remote:path encryptedremote:path

After it has run it will log the status of the encryptedremote:.

If you supply the --one-way flag, it will only check that files in the source match the files in the destination, not the other way around. This means that extra files in the destination that are not in the source will not be detected.

The --differ, --missing-on-dst, --missing-on-src, --match and --error flags write paths, one per line, to the file name (or stdout if it is -) supplied. What they write is described in the help below. For example --differ will write all paths which are present on both the source and destination but different.

The --combined flag will write a file (or stdout) which contains all file paths with a symbol and then a space and then the path to tell you what happened to it. These are reminiscent of diff files.

• = path means path was found in source and destination and was identical
• `- path` means path was missing on the source, so only in the destination
• `+ path` means path was missing on the destination, so only in the source
• `* path` means path was present in source and destination but different.
• ! path means there was an error reading or hashing the source or dest.

The default number of parallel checks is 8. See the --checkers=N (https://rclone.org/docs/#checkers-n) option for more information.

rclone cryptcheck remote:path cryptedremote:path [flags]

      --combined string         Make a combined report of changes to this file
      --differ string           Report all non-matching files to this file
      --error string            Report all files with errors (hashing or reading) to this file
  -h, --help                    help for cryptcheck
      --match string            Report all matching files to this file
      --missing-on-dst string   Report all files missing from the destination to this file
      --missing-on-src string   Report all files missing from the source to this file
      --one-way                 Check one way only, source files must exist on remote

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags used for check commands

      --max-backlog int   Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Returns unencrypted file names when provided with a list of encrypted file names. List limit is 10 items.

If you supply the --reverse flag, it will return encrypted file names.

use it like this

rclone cryptdecode encryptedremote: encryptedfilename1 encryptedfilename2

rclone cryptdecode --reverse encryptedremote: filename1 filename2

Another way to accomplish this is by using the rclone backend encode (or decode) command. See the documentation on the crypt (https://rclone.org/crypt/) overlay for more info.

rclone cryptdecode encryptedremote: encryptedfilename [flags]

  -h, --help      help for cryptdecode
      --reverse   Reverse cryptdecode, encrypts filenames

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Remove a single file from remote. Unlike delete it cannot be used to remove a directory and it doesn't obey include/exclude filters - if the specified file exists, it will always be removed.

rclone deletefile remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for deletefile

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This produces markdown docs for the rclone commands to the directory supplied. These are in a format suitable for hugo to render into the rclone.org website.

rclone gendocs output_directory [flags]

  -h, --help   help for gendocs

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Rclone's gitannex subcommand enables git-annex (https://git-annex.branchable.com/) to store and retrieve content from an rclone remote. It is meant to be run by git-annex, not directly by users.

1. Skip this step if your version of git-annex is 10.20240430 (https://git-annex.branchable.com/news/version_10.20240430/) or newer. Otherwise, you must create a symlink somewhere on your PATH with a particular name. This symlink helps git-annex tell rclone it wants to run the "gitannex" subcommand.

   # Create the helper symlink in "$HOME/bin".
   ln -s "$(realpath rclone)" "$HOME/bin/git-annex-remote-rclone-builtin"
   
   # Verify the new symlink is on your PATH.
   which git-annex-remote-rclone-builtin

2. Add a new remote to your git-annex repo. This new remote will connect git-annex with the rclone gitannex subcommand.

   Start by asking git-annex to describe the remote's available configuration parameters.

   # If you skipped step 1:
   git annex initremote MyRemote type=rclone --whatelse
   
   # If you created a symlink in step 1:
   git annex initremote MyRemote type=external externaltype=rclone-builtin --whatelse

   NOTE: If you're porting an existing git-annex-remote-rclone (https://github.com/git-annex-remote-rclone/git-annex-remote-rclone) remote to use rclone gitannex, you can probably reuse the configuration parameters verbatim without renaming them. Check parameter synonyms with --whatelse as shown above.

   The following example creates a new git-annex remote named "MyRemote" that will use the rclone remote named "SomeRcloneRemote". That rclone remote must be one configured in your rclone.conf file, which can be located with rclone config file.

   git annex initremote MyRemote         \
       type=external                     \
       externaltype=rclone-builtin       \
       encryption=none                   \
       rcloneremotename=SomeRcloneRemote \
       rcloneprefix=git-annex-content    \
       rclonelayout=nodir

3. Before you trust this command with your precious data, be sure to test the remote. This command is very new and has not been tested on many rclone backends. Caveat emptor!

   git annex testremote MyRemote

Happy annexing!

rclone gitannex [flags]

  -h, --help   help for gitannex

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Produces a hash file for all the objects in the path using the hash named. The output is in the same format as the standard md5sum/sha1sum tool.

By default, the hash is requested from the remote. If the hash is not supported by the remote, no hash will be returned. With the download flag, the file will be downloaded from the remote and hashed locally enabling any hash for any remote.

For the MD5 and SHA1 algorithms there are also dedicated commands, md5sum (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_md5sum/) and sha1sum (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_sha1sum/).

This command can also hash data received on standard input (stdin), by not passing a remote:path, or by passing a hyphen as remote:path when there is data to read (if not, the hyphen will be treated literally, as a relative path).

Run without a hash to see the list of all supported hashes, e.g.

$ rclone hashsum
Supported hashes are:
  * md5
  * sha1
  * whirlpool
  * crc32
  * sha256

Then

$ rclone hashsum MD5 remote:path

Note that hash names are case insensitive and values are output in lower case.

rclone hashsum [<hash> remote:path] [flags]

      --base64               Output base64 encoded hashsum
  -C, --checkfile string     Validate hashes against a given SUM file instead of printing them
      --download             Download the file and hash it locally; if this flag is not specified, the hash is requested from the remote
  -h, --help                 help for hashsum
      --output-file string   Output hashsums to a file rather than the terminal

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Create, retrieve or remove a public link to the given file or folder.

rclone link remote:path/to/file
rclone link remote:path/to/folder/
rclone link --unlink remote:path/to/folder/
rclone link --expire 1d remote:path/to/file

If you supply the --expire flag, it will set the expiration time otherwise it will use the default (100 years). Note not all backends support the --expire flag - if the backend doesn't support it then the link returned won't expire.

Use the --unlink flag to remove existing public links to the file or folder. Note not all backends support "--unlink" flag - those that don't will just ignore it.

If successful, the last line of the output will contain the link. Exact capabilities depend on the remote, but the link will always by default be created with the least constraints – e.g. no expiry, no password protection, accessible without account.

rclone link remote:path [flags]

      --expire Duration   The amount of time that the link will be valid (default off)
  -h, --help              help for link
      --unlink            Remove existing public link to file/folder

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Lists all the available remotes from the config file, or the remotes matching an optional filter.

Prints the result in human-readable format by default, and as a simple list of remote names, or if used with flag --long a tabular format including the remote names, types and descriptions. Using flag --json produces machine-readable output instead, which always includes all attributes - including the source (file or environment).

Result can be filtered by a filter argument which applies to all attributes, and/or filter flags specific for each attribute. The values must be specified according to regular rclone filtering pattern syntax.

rclone listremotes [<filter>] [flags]

      --description string   Filter remotes by description
  -h, --help                 help for listremotes
      --json                 Format output as JSON
      --long                 Show type and description in addition to name
      --name string          Filter remotes by name
      --order-by string      Instructions on how to order the result, e.g. 'type,name=descending'
      --source string        Filter remotes by source, e.g. 'file' or 'environment'
      --type string          Filter remotes by type

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

List the contents of the source path (directories and objects) to standard output in a form which is easy to parse by scripts. By default this will just be the names of the objects and directories, one per line. The directories will have a / suffix.

Eg

$ rclone lsf swift:bucket
bevajer5jef
canole
diwogej7
ferejej3gux/
fubuwic

Use the --format option to control what gets listed. By default this is just the path, but you can use these parameters to control the output:

p - path
s - size
t - modification time
h - hash
i - ID of object
o - Original ID of underlying object
m - MimeType of object if known
e - encrypted name
T - tier of storage if known, e.g. "Hot" or "Cool"
M - Metadata of object in JSON blob format, eg {"key":"value"}

So if you wanted the path, size and modification time, you would use --format "pst", or maybe --format "tsp" to put the path last.

Eg

$ rclone lsf  --format "tsp" swift:bucket
2016-06-25 18:55:41;60295;bevajer5jef
2016-06-25 18:55:43;90613;canole
2016-06-25 18:55:43;94467;diwogej7
2018-04-26 08:50:45;0;ferejej3gux/
2016-06-25 18:55:40;37600;fubuwic

If you specify "h" in the format you will get the MD5 hash by default, use the --hash flag to change which hash you want. Note that this can be returned as an empty string if it isn't available on the object (and for directories), "ERROR" if there was an error reading it from the object and "UNSUPPORTED" if that object does not support that hash type.

For example, to emulate the md5sum command you can use

rclone lsf -R --hash MD5 --format hp --separator "  " --files-only .

Eg

$ rclone lsf -R --hash MD5 --format hp --separator "  " --files-only swift:bucket
7908e352297f0f530b84a756f188baa3  bevajer5jef
cd65ac234e6fea5925974a51cdd865cc  canole
03b5341b4f234b9d984d03ad076bae91  diwogej7
8fd37c3810dd660778137ac3a66cc06d  fubuwic
99713e14a4c4ff553acaf1930fad985b  gixacuh7ku

(Though "rclone md5sum ." is an easier way of typing this.)

By default the separator is ";" this can be changed with the --separator flag. Note that separators aren't escaped in the path so putting it last is a good strategy.

Eg

$ rclone lsf  --separator "," --format "tshp" swift:bucket
2016-06-25 18:55:41,60295,7908e352297f0f530b84a756f188baa3,bevajer5jef
2016-06-25 18:55:43,90613,cd65ac234e6fea5925974a51cdd865cc,canole
2016-06-25 18:55:43,94467,03b5341b4f234b9d984d03ad076bae91,diwogej7
2018-04-26 08:52:53,0,,ferejej3gux/
2016-06-25 18:55:40,37600,8fd37c3810dd660778137ac3a66cc06d,fubuwic

You can output in CSV standard format. This will escape things in " if they contain ,

Eg

$ rclone lsf --csv --files-only --format ps remote:path
test.log,22355
test.sh,449
"this file contains a comma, in the file name.txt",6

Note that the --absolute parameter is useful for making lists of files to pass to an rclone copy with the --files-from-raw flag.

For example, to find all the files modified within one day and copy those only (without traversing the whole directory structure):

rclone lsf --absolute --files-only --max-age 1d /path/to/local > new_files
rclone copy --files-from-raw new_files /path/to/local remote:path

The default time format is '2006-01-02 15:04:05'. Other formats (https://pkg.go.dev/time#pkg-constants) can be specified with the --time-format flag. Examples:

rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format 'Jan 2, 2006 at 3:04pm (MST)'
rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format '2006-01-02 15:04:05.000000000'
rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format '2006-01-02T15:04:05.999999999Z07:00'
rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format RFC3339
rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format DateOnly
rclone lsf remote:path --format pt --time-format max

--time-format max will automatically truncate '2006-01-02 15:04:05.000000000' to the maximum precision supported by the remote.

Any of the filtering options can be applied to this command.

There are several related list commands

• ls to list size and path of objects only
• lsl to list modification time, size and path of objects only
• lsd to list directories only
• lsf to list objects and directories in easy to parse format
• lsjson to list objects and directories in JSON format

ls,lsl,lsd are designed to be human-readable. lsf is designed to be human and machine-readable. lsjson is designed to be machine-readable.

Note that ls and lsl recurse by default - use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

The other list commands lsd,lsf,lsjson do not recurse by default - use -R to make them recurse.

Listing a nonexistent directory will produce an error except for remotes which can't have empty directories (e.g. s3, swift, or gcs - the bucket-based remotes).

rclone lsf remote:path [flags]

      --absolute             Put a leading / in front of path names
      --csv                  Output in CSV format
  -d, --dir-slash            Append a slash to directory names (default true)
      --dirs-only            Only list directories
      --files-only           Only list files
  -F, --format string        Output format - see  help for details (default "p")
      --hash h               Use this hash when h is used in the format MD5|SHA-1|DropboxHash (default "md5")
  -h, --help                 help for lsf
  -R, --recursive            Recurse into the listing
  -s, --separator string     Separator for the items in the format (default ";")
  -t, --time-format string   Specify a custom time format, or 'max' for max precision supported by remote (default: 2006-01-02 15:04:05)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

List directories and objects in the path in JSON format.

The output is an array of Items, where each Item looks like this:

{
  "Hashes" : {
     "SHA-1" : "f572d396fae9206628714fb2ce00f72e94f2258f",
     "MD5" : "b1946ac92492d2347c6235b4d2611184",
     "DropboxHash" : "ecb65bb98f9d905b70458986c39fcbad7715e5f2fcc3b1f07767d7c83e2438cc"
  },
  "ID": "y2djkhiujf83u33",
  "OrigID": "UYOJVTUW00Q1RzTDA",
  "IsBucket" : false,
  "IsDir" : false,
  "MimeType" : "application/octet-stream",
  "ModTime" : "2017-05-31T16:15:57.034468261+01:00",
  "Name" : "file.txt",
  "Encrypted" : "v0qpsdq8anpci8n929v3uu9338",
  "EncryptedPath" : "kja9098349023498/v0qpsdq8anpci8n929v3uu9338",
  "Path" : "full/path/goes/here/file.txt",
  "Size" : 6,
  "Tier" : "hot",
}

The exact set of properties included depends on the backend:

• The property IsBucket will only be included for bucket-based remotes, and only for directories that are buckets. It will always be omitted when value is not true.
• Properties Encrypted and EncryptedPath will only be included for encrypted remotes, and (as mentioned below) only if the --encrypted option is set.

Different options may also affect which properties are included:

• If --hash is not specified, the Hashes property will be omitted. The types of hash can be specified with the --hash-type parameter (which may be repeated). If --hash-type is set then it implies --hash.
• If --no-modtime is specified then ModTime will be blank. This can speed things up on remotes where reading the ModTime takes an extra request (e.g. s3, swift).
• If --no-mimetype is specified then MimeType will be blank. This can speed things up on remotes where reading the MimeType takes an extra request (e.g. s3, swift).
• If --encrypted is not specified the Encrypted and EncryptedPath properties will be omitted - even for encrypted remotes.
• If --metadata is set then an additional Metadata property will be returned. This will have metadata (https://rclone.org/docs/#metadata) in rclone standard format as a JSON object.

The default is to list directories and files/objects, but this can be changed with the following options:

• If --dirs-only is specified then directories will be returned only, no files/objects.
• If --files-only is specified then files will be returned only, no directories.

If --stat is set then the the output is not an array of items, but instead a single JSON blob will be returned about the item pointed to. This will return an error if the item isn't found, however on bucket based backends (like s3, gcs, b2, azureblob etc) if the item isn't found it will return an empty directory, as it isn't possible to tell empty directories from missing directories there.

The Path field will only show folders below the remote path being listed. If "remote:path" contains the file "subfolder/file.txt", the Path for "file.txt" will be "subfolder/file.txt", not "remote:path/subfolder/file.txt". When used without --recursive the Path will always be the same as Name.

The time is in RFC3339 format with up to nanosecond precision. The number of decimal digits in the seconds will depend on the precision that the remote can hold the times, so if times are accurate to the nearest millisecond (e.g. Google Drive) then 3 digits will always be shown ("2017-05-31T16:15:57.034+01:00") whereas if the times are accurate to the nearest second (Dropbox, Box, WebDav, etc.) no digits will be shown ("2017-05-31T16:15:57+01:00").

The whole output can be processed as a JSON blob, or alternatively it can be processed line by line as each item is written on individual lines (except with --stat).

Any of the filtering options can be applied to this command.

There are several related list commands

• ls to list size and path of objects only
• lsl to list modification time, size and path of objects only
• lsd to list directories only
• lsf to list objects and directories in easy to parse format
• lsjson to list objects and directories in JSON format

ls,lsl,lsd are designed to be human-readable. lsf is designed to be human and machine-readable. lsjson is designed to be machine-readable.

Note that ls and lsl recurse by default - use --max-depth 1 to stop the recursion.

The other list commands lsd,lsf,lsjson do not recurse by default - use -R to make them recurse.

Listing a nonexistent directory will produce an error except for remotes which can't have empty directories (e.g. s3, swift, or gcs - the bucket-based remotes).

rclone lsjson remote:path [flags]

      --dirs-only               Show only directories in the listing
      --encrypted               Show the encrypted names
      --files-only              Show only files in the listing
      --hash                    Include hashes in the output (may take longer)
      --hash-type stringArray   Show only this hash type (may be repeated)
  -h, --help                    help for lsjson
  -M, --metadata                Add metadata to the listing
      --no-mimetype             Don't read the mime type (can speed things up)
      --no-modtime              Don't read the modification time (can speed things up)
      --original                Show the ID of the underlying Object
  -R, --recursive               Recurse into the listing
      --stat                    Just return the info for the pointed to file

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Rclone mount allows Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows to mount any of Rclone's cloud storage systems as a file system with FUSE.

First set up your remote using rclone config. Check it works with rclone ls etc.

On Linux and macOS, you can run mount in either foreground or background (aka daemon) mode. Mount runs in foreground mode by default. Use the --daemon flag to force background mode. On Windows you can run mount in foreground only, the flag is ignored.

In background mode rclone acts as a generic Unix mount program: the main program starts, spawns background rclone process to setup and maintain the mount, waits until success or timeout and exits with appropriate code (killing the child process if it fails).

On Linux/macOS/FreeBSD start the mount like this, where /path/to/local/mount is an empty existing directory:

rclone mount remote:path/to/files /path/to/local/mount

On Windows you can start a mount in different ways. See below for details. If foreground mount is used interactively from a console window, rclone will serve the mount and occupy the console so another window should be used to work with the mount until rclone is interrupted e.g. by pressing Ctrl-C.

The following examples will mount to an automatically assigned drive, to specific drive letter X:, to path C:\path\parent\mount (where parent directory or drive must exist, and mount must not exist, and is not supported when mounting as a network drive), and the last example will mount as network share \\cloud\remote and map it to an automatically assigned drive:

rclone mount remote:path/to/files *
rclone mount remote:path/to/files X:
rclone mount remote:path/to/files C:\path\parent\mount
rclone mount remote:path/to/files \\cloud\remote

When the program ends while in foreground mode, either via Ctrl+C or receiving a SIGINT or SIGTERM signal, the mount should be automatically stopped.

When running in background mode the user will have to stop the mount manually:

# Linux
fusermount -u /path/to/local/mount
#... or on some systems
fusermount3 -u /path/to/local/mount
# OS X or Linux when using nfsmount
umount /path/to/local/mount

The umount operation can fail, for example when the mountpoint is busy. When that happens, it is the user's responsibility to stop the mount manually.

The size of the mounted file system will be set according to information retrieved from the remote, the same as returned by the rclone about (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_about/) command. Remotes with unlimited storage may report the used size only, then an additional 1 PiB of free space is assumed. If the remote does not support (https://rclone.org/overview/#optional-features) the about feature at all, then 1 PiB is set as both the total and the free size.

To run rclone mount on Windows, you will need to download and install WinFsp (http://www.secfs.net/winfsp/).

WinFsp (https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp) is an open-source Windows File System Proxy which makes it easy to write user space file systems for Windows. It provides a FUSE emulation layer which rclone uses combination with cgofuse (https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse). Both of these packages are by Bill Zissimopoulos who was very helpful during the implementation of rclone mount for Windows.

Unlike other operating systems, Microsoft Windows provides a different filesystem type for network and fixed drives. It optimises access on the assumption fixed disk drives are fast and reliable, while network drives have relatively high latency and less reliability. Some settings can also be differentiated between the two types, for example that Windows Explorer should just display icons and not create preview thumbnails for image and video files on network drives.

In most cases, rclone will mount the remote as a normal, fixed disk drive by default. However, you can also choose to mount it as a remote network drive, often described as a network share. If you mount an rclone remote using the default, fixed drive mode and experience unexpected program errors, freezes or other issues, consider mounting as a network drive instead.

When mounting as a fixed disk drive you can either mount to an unused drive letter, or to a path representing a nonexistent subdirectory of an existing parent directory or drive. Using the special value * will tell rclone to automatically assign the next available drive letter, starting with Z: and moving backward. Examples:

rclone mount remote:path/to/files *
rclone mount remote:path/to/files X:
rclone mount remote:path/to/files C:\path\parent\mount
rclone mount remote:path/to/files X:

Option --volname can be used to set a custom volume name for the mounted file system. The default is to use the remote name and path.

To mount as network drive, you can add option --network-mode to your mount command. Mounting to a directory path is not supported in this mode, it is a limitation Windows imposes on junctions, so the remote must always be mounted to a drive letter.

rclone mount remote:path/to/files X: --network-mode

A volume name specified with --volname will be used to create the network share path. A complete UNC path, such as \\cloud\remote, optionally with path \\cloud\remote\madeup\path, will be used as is. Any other string will be used as the share part, after a default prefix \\server\. If no volume name is specified then \\server\share will be used. You must make sure the volume name is unique when you are mounting more than one drive, or else the mount command will fail. The share name will treated as the volume label for the mapped drive, shown in Windows Explorer etc, while the complete \\server\share will be reported as the remote UNC path by net use etc, just like a normal network drive mapping.

If you specify a full network share UNC path with --volname, this will implicitly set the --network-mode option, so the following two examples have same result:

rclone mount remote:path/to/files X: --network-mode
rclone mount remote:path/to/files X: --volname \\server\share

You may also specify the network share UNC path as the mountpoint itself. Then rclone will automatically assign a drive letter, same as with * and use that as mountpoint, and instead use the UNC path specified as the volume name, as if it were specified with the --volname option. This will also implicitly set the --network-mode option. This means the following two examples have same result:

rclone mount remote:path/to/files \\cloud\remote
rclone mount remote:path/to/files * --volname \\cloud\remote

There is yet another way to enable network mode, and to set the share path, and that is to pass the "native" libfuse/WinFsp option directly: --fuse-flag --VolumePrefix=\server\share. Note that the path must be with just a single backslash prefix in this case.

Note: In previous versions of rclone this was the only supported method.

Read more about drive mapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_mapping)

See also Limitations section below.

The FUSE emulation layer on Windows must convert between the POSIX-based permission model used in FUSE, and the permission model used in Windows, based on access-control lists (ACL).

The mounted filesystem will normally get three entries in its access-control list (ACL), representing permissions for the POSIX permission scopes: Owner, group and others. By default, the owner and group will be taken from the current user, and the built-in group "Everyone" will be used to represent others. The user/group can be customized with FUSE options "UserName" and "GroupName", e.g. -o UserName=user123 -o GroupName="Authenticated Users". The permissions on each entry will be set according to options --dir-perms and --file-perms, which takes a value in traditional Unix numeric notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File-system_permissions#Numeric_notation).

The default permissions corresponds to --file-perms 0666 --dir-perms 0777, i.e. read and write permissions to everyone. This means you will not be able to start any programs from the mount. To be able to do that you must add execute permissions, e.g. --file-perms 0777 --dir-perms 0777 to add it to everyone. If the program needs to write files, chances are you will have to enable VFS File Caching as well (see also limitations). Note that the default write permission have some restrictions for accounts other than the owner, specifically it lacks the "write extended attributes", as explained next.

The mapping of permissions is not always trivial, and the result you see in Windows Explorer may not be exactly like you expected. For example, when setting a value that includes write access for the group or others scope, this will be mapped to individual permissions "write attributes", "write data" and "append data", but not "write extended attributes". Windows will then show this as basic permission "Special" instead of "Write", because "Write" also covers the "write extended attributes" permission. When setting digit 0 for group or others, to indicate no permissions, they will still get individual permissions "read attributes", "read extended attributes" and "read permissions". This is done for compatibility reasons, e.g. to allow users without additional permissions to be able to read basic metadata about files like in Unix.

WinFsp 2021 (version 1.9) introduced a new FUSE option "FileSecurity", that allows the complete specification of file security descriptors using SDDL (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/security-descriptor-string-format). With this you get detailed control of the resulting permissions, compared to use of the POSIX permissions described above, and no additional permissions will be added automatically for compatibility with Unix. Some example use cases will following.

If you set POSIX permissions for only allowing access to the owner, using --file-perms 0600 --dir-perms 0700, the user group and the built-in "Everyone" group will still be given some special permissions, as described above. Some programs may then (incorrectly) interpret this as the file being accessible by everyone, for example an SSH client may warn about "unprotected private key file". You can work around this by specifying -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FA;;;OW)", which sets file all access (FA) to the owner (OW), and nothing else.

When setting write permissions then, except for the owner, this does not include the "write extended attributes" permission, as mentioned above. This may prevent applications from writing to files, giving permission denied error instead. To set working write permissions for the built-in "Everyone" group, similar to what it gets by default but with the addition of the "write extended attributes", you can specify -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FRFW;;;WD)", which sets file read (FR) and file write (FW) to everyone (WD). If file execute (FX) is also needed, then change to -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FRFWFX;;;WD)", or set file all access (FA) to get full access permissions, including delete, with -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FA;;;WD)".

Drives created as Administrator are not visible to other accounts, not even an account that was elevated to Administrator with the User Account Control (UAC) feature. A result of this is that if you mount to a drive letter from a Command Prompt run as Administrator, and then try to access the same drive from Windows Explorer (which does not run as Administrator), you will not be able to see the mounted drive.

If you don't need to access the drive from applications running with administrative privileges, the easiest way around this is to always create the mount from a non-elevated command prompt.

To make mapped drives available to the user account that created them regardless if elevated or not, there is a special Windows setting called linked connections (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/networking/mapped-drives-not-available-from-elevated-command#detail-to-configure-the-enablelinkedconnections-registry-entry) that can be enabled.

It is also possible to make a drive mount available to everyone on the system, by running the process creating it as the built-in SYSTEM account. There are several ways to do this: One is to use the command-line utility PsExec (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec), from Microsoft's Sysinternals suite, which has option -s to start processes as the SYSTEM account. Another alternative is to run the mount command from a Windows Scheduled Task, or a Windows Service, configured to run as the SYSTEM account. A third alternative is to use the WinFsp.Launcher infrastructure (https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp/wiki/WinFsp-Service-Architecture)). Read more in the install documentation (https://rclone.org/install/). Note that when running rclone as another user, it will not use the configuration file from your profile unless you tell it to with the --config (https://rclone.org/docs/#config-config-file) option. Note also that it is now the SYSTEM account that will have the owner permissions, and other accounts will have permissions according to the group or others scopes. As mentioned above, these will then not get the "write extended attributes" permission, and this may prevent writing to files. You can work around this with the FileSecurity option, see example above.

Note that mapping to a directory path, instead of a drive letter, does not suffer from the same limitations.

Mounting on macOS can be done either via built-in NFS server (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_nfs/), macFUSE (https://osxfuse.github.io/) (also known as osxfuse) or FUSE-T (https://www.fuse-t.org/). macFUSE is a traditional FUSE driver utilizing a macOS kernel extension (kext). FUSE-T is an alternative FUSE system which "mounts" via an NFSv4 local server.

It is highly recommended to keep the default of --no-unicode-normalization=false for all mount and serve commands on macOS. For details, see vfs-case-sensitivity (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/#vfs-case-sensitivity).

This method spins up an NFS server using serve nfs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_nfs/) command and mounts it to the specified mountpoint. If you run this in background mode using |--daemon|, you will need to send SIGTERM signal to the rclone process using |kill| command to stop the mount.

Note that --nfs-cache-handle-limit controls the maximum number of cached file handles stored by the nfsmount caching handler. This should not be set too low or you may experience errors when trying to access files. The default is 1000000, but consider lowering this limit if the server's system resource usage causes problems.

If installing macFUSE using dmg packages (https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/releases) from the website, rclone will locate the macFUSE libraries without any further intervention. If however, macFUSE is installed using the macports (https://www.macports.org/) package manager, the following addition steps are required.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib
cd /usr/local/lib
sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libfuse.2.dylib

There are some limitations, caveats, and notes about how it works. These are current as of FUSE-T version 1.0.14.

As per the FUSE-T wiki (https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#caveats):

This means that viewing files with various tools, notably macOS Finder, will cause rlcone to update the modification time of the file. This may make rclone upload a full new copy of the file.

When mounting with --read-only, attempts to write to files will fail silently as opposed to with a clear warning as in macFUSE.

Without the use of --vfs-cache-mode this can only write files sequentially, it can only seek when reading. This means that many applications won't work with their files on an rclone mount without --vfs-cache-mode writes or --vfs-cache-mode full. See the VFS File Caching section for more info. When using NFS mount on macOS, if you don't specify |--vfs-cache-mode| the mount point will be read-only.

The bucket-based remotes (e.g. Swift, S3, Google Compute Storage, B2) do not support the concept of empty directories, so empty directories will have a tendency to disappear once they fall out of the directory cache.

When rclone mount is invoked on Unix with --daemon flag, the main rclone program will wait for the background mount to become ready or until the timeout specified by the --daemon-wait flag. On Linux it can check mount status using ProcFS so the flag in fact sets maximum time to wait, while the real wait can be less. On macOS / BSD the time to wait is constant and the check is performed only at the end. We advise you to set wait time on macOS reasonably.

Only supported on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows at the moment.

File systems expect things to be 100% reliable, whereas cloud storage systems are a long way from 100% reliable. The rclone sync/copy commands cope with this with lots of retries. However rclone mount can't use retries in the same way without making local copies of the uploads. Look at the VFS File Caching for solutions to make mount more reliable.

You can use the flag --attr-timeout to set the time the kernel caches the attributes (size, modification time, etc.) for directory entries.

The default is 1s which caches files just long enough to avoid too many callbacks to rclone from the kernel.

In theory 0s should be the correct value for filesystems which can change outside the control of the kernel. However this causes quite a few problems such as rclone using too much memory (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2157), rclone not serving files to samba (https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-1-39-vs-1-40-mount-issue/5112) and excessive time listing directories (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2095#issuecomment-371141147).

The kernel can cache the info about a file for the time given by --attr-timeout. You may see corruption if the remote file changes length during this window. It will show up as either a truncated file or a file with garbage on the end. With --attr-timeout 1s this is very unlikely but not impossible. The higher you set --attr-timeout the more likely it is. The default setting of "1s" is the lowest setting which mitigates the problems above.

If you set it higher (10s or 1m say) then the kernel will call back to rclone less often making it more efficient, however there is more chance of the corruption issue above.

If files don't change on the remote outside of the control of rclone then there is no chance of corruption.

This is the same as setting the attr_timeout option in mount.fuse.

Note that all the rclone filters can be used to select a subset of the files to be visible in the mount.

When running rclone mount as a systemd service, it is possible to use Type=notify. In this case the service will enter the started state after the mountpoint has been successfully set up. Units having the rclone mount service specified as a requirement will see all files and folders immediately in this mode.

Note that systemd runs mount units without any environment variables including PATH or HOME. This means that tilde (~) expansion will not work and you should provide --config and --cache-dir explicitly as absolute paths via rclone arguments. Since mounting requires the fusermount or fusermount3 program, rclone will use the fallback PATH of /bin:/usr/bin in this scenario. Please ensure that fusermount/fusermount3 is present on this PATH.

The core Unix program /bin/mount normally takes the -t FSTYPE argument then runs the /sbin/mount.FSTYPE helper program passing it mount options as -o key=val,... or --opt=.... Automount (classic or systemd) behaves in a similar way.

rclone by default expects GNU-style flags --key val. To run it as a mount helper you should symlink rclone binary to /sbin/mount.rclone and optionally /usr/bin/rclonefs, e.g. ln -s /usr/bin/rclone /sbin/mount.rclone. rclone will detect it and translate command-line arguments appropriately.

Now you can run classic mounts like this:

mount sftp1:subdir /mnt/data -t rclone -o vfs_cache_mode=writes,sftp_key_file=/path/to/pem

or create systemd mount units:

# /etc/systemd/system/mnt-data.mount
[Unit]
Description=Mount for /mnt/data
[Mount]
Type=rclone
What=sftp1:subdir
Where=/mnt/data
Options=rw,_netdev,allow_other,args2env,vfs-cache-mode=writes,config=/etc/rclone.conf,cache-dir=/var/rclone

optionally accompanied by systemd automount unit

# /etc/systemd/system/mnt-data.automount
[Unit]
Description=AutoMount for /mnt/data
[Automount]
Where=/mnt/data
TimeoutIdleSec=600
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

or add in /etc/fstab a line like

sftp1:subdir /mnt/data rclone rw,noauto,nofail,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,args2env,vfs_cache_mode=writes,config=/etc/rclone.conf,cache_dir=/var/cache/rclone 0 0

or use classic Automountd. Remember to provide explicit config=...,cache-dir=... as a workaround for mount units being run without HOME.

Rclone in the mount helper mode will split -o argument(s) by comma, replace _ by - and prepend -- to get the command-line flags. Options containing commas or spaces can be wrapped in single or double quotes. Any inner quotes inside outer quotes of the same type should be doubled.

Mount option syntax includes a few extra options treated specially:

• env.NAME=VALUE will set an environment variable for the mount process. This helps with Automountd and Systemd.mount which don't allow setting custom environment for mount helpers. Typically you will use env.HTTPS_PROXY=proxy.host:3128 or env.HOME=/root
• command=cmount can be used to run cmount or any other rclone command rather than the default mount.
• args2env will pass mount options to the mount helper running in background via environment variables instead of command line arguments. This allows to hide secrets from such commands as ps or pgrep.
• vv... will be transformed into appropriate --verbose=N
• standard mount options like x-systemd.automount, _netdev, nosuid and alike are intended only for Automountd and ignored by rclone.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone mount remote:path /path/to/mountpoint [flags]

      --allow-non-empty                        Allow mounting over a non-empty directory (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-other                            Allow access to other users (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-root                             Allow access to root user (not supported on Windows)
      --async-read                             Use asynchronous reads (not supported on Windows) (default true)
      --attr-timeout Duration                  Time for which file/directory attributes are cached (default 1s)
      --daemon                                 Run mount in background and exit parent process (as background output is suppressed, use --log-file with --log-format=pid,... to monitor) (not supported on Windows)
      --daemon-timeout Duration                Time limit for rclone to respond to kernel (not supported on Windows) (default 0s)
      --daemon-wait Duration                   Time to wait for ready mount from daemon (maximum time on Linux, constant sleep time on OSX/BSD) (not supported on Windows) (default 1m0s)
      --debug-fuse                             Debug the FUSE internals - needs -v
      --default-permissions                    Makes kernel enforce access control based on the file mode (not supported on Windows)
      --devname string                         Set the device name - default is remote:path
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --direct-io                              Use Direct IO, disables caching of data
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --fuse-flag stringArray                  Flags or arguments to be passed direct to libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for mount
      --max-read-ahead SizeSuffix              The number of bytes that can be prefetched for sequential reads (not supported on Windows) (default 128Ki)
      --mount-case-insensitive Tristate        Tell the OS the mount is case insensitive (true) or sensitive (false) regardless of the backend (auto) (default unset)
      --network-mode                           Mount as remote network drive, instead of fixed disk drive (supported on Windows only)
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --noappledouble                          Ignore Apple Double (._) and .DS_Store files (supported on OSX only) (default true)
      --noapplexattr                           Ignore all "com.apple.*" extended attributes (supported on OSX only)
  -o, --option stringArray                     Option for libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)
      --volname string                         Set the volume name (supported on Windows and OSX only)
      --write-back-cache                       Makes kernel buffer writes before sending them to rclone (without this, writethrough caching is used) (not supported on Windows)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

If source:path is a file or directory then it moves it to a file or directory named dest:path.

This can be used to rename files or upload single files to other than their existing name. If the source is a directory then it acts exactly like the move (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_move/) command.

So

rclone moveto src dst

where src and dst are rclone paths, either remote:path or /path/to/local or C:.

This will:

if src is file
    move it to dst, overwriting an existing file if it exists
if src is directory
    move it to dst, overwriting existing files if they exist
    see move command for full details

This doesn't transfer files that are identical on src and dst, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. src will be deleted on successful transfer.

Important: Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics.

rclone moveto source:path dest:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for moveto

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for anything which can copy a file

      --check-first                                 Do all the checks before starting transfers
  -c, --checksum                                    Check for changes with size & checksum (if available, or fallback to size only)
      --compare-dest stringArray                    Include additional server-side paths during comparison
      --copy-dest stringArray                       Implies --compare-dest but also copies files from paths into destination
      --cutoff-mode HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS              Mode to stop transfers when reaching the max transfer limit HARD|SOFT|CAUTIOUS (default HARD)
      --ignore-case-sync                            Ignore case when synchronizing
      --ignore-checksum                             Skip post copy check of checksums
      --ignore-existing                             Skip all files that exist on destination
      --ignore-size                                 Ignore size when skipping use modtime or checksum
  -I, --ignore-times                                Don't skip items that match size and time - transfer all unconditionally
      --immutable                                   Do not modify files, fail if existing files have been modified
      --inplace                                     Download directly to destination file instead of atomic download to temp/rename
      --max-backlog int                             Maximum number of objects in sync or check backlog (default 10000)
      --max-duration Duration                       Maximum duration rclone will transfer data for (default 0s)
      --max-transfer SizeSuffix                     Maximum size of data to transfer (default off)
  -M, --metadata                                    If set, preserve metadata when copying objects
      --modify-window Duration                      Max time diff to be considered the same (default 1ns)
      --multi-thread-chunk-size SizeSuffix          Chunk size for multi-thread downloads / uploads, if not set by filesystem (default 64Mi)
      --multi-thread-cutoff SizeSuffix              Use multi-thread downloads for files above this size (default 256Mi)
      --multi-thread-streams int                    Number of streams to use for multi-thread downloads (default 4)
      --multi-thread-write-buffer-size SizeSuffix   In memory buffer size for writing when in multi-thread mode (default 128Ki)
      --no-check-dest                               Don't check the destination, copy regardless
      --no-traverse                                 Don't traverse destination file system on copy
      --no-update-dir-modtime                       Don't update directory modification times
      --no-update-modtime                           Don't update destination modtime if files identical
      --order-by string                             Instructions on how to order the transfers, e.g. 'size,descending'
      --partial-suffix string                       Add partial-suffix to temporary file name when --inplace is not used (default ".partial")
      --refresh-times                               Refresh the modtime of remote files
      --server-side-across-configs                  Allow server-side operations (e.g. copy) to work across different configs
      --size-only                                   Skip based on size only, not modtime or checksum
      --streaming-upload-cutoff SizeSuffix          Cutoff for switching to chunked upload if file size is unknown, upload starts after reaching cutoff or when file ends (default 100Ki)
  -u, --update                                      Skip files that are newer on the destination

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This displays a text based user interface allowing the navigation of a remote. It is most useful for answering the question - "What is using all my disk space?".

To make the user interface it first scans the entire remote given and builds an in memory representation. rclone ncdu can be used during this scanning phase and you will see it building up the directory structure as it goes along.

You can interact with the user interface using key presses, press '?' to toggle the help on and off. The supported keys are:

 ↑,↓ or k,j to Move
 →,l to enter
 ←,h to return
 g toggle graph
 c toggle counts
 a toggle average size in directory
 m toggle modified time
 u toggle human-readable format
 n,s,C,A,M sort by name,size,count,asize,mtime
 d delete file/directory
 v select file/directory
 V enter visual select mode
 D delete selected files/directories
 y copy current path to clipboard
 Y display current path
 ^L refresh screen (fix screen corruption)
 r recalculate file sizes
 ? to toggle help on and off
 ESC to close the menu box
 q/^c to quit

Listed files/directories may be prefixed by a one-character flag, some of them combined with a description in brackets at end of line. These flags have the following meaning:

e means this is an empty directory, i.e. contains no files (but
  may contain empty subdirectories)
~ means this is a directory where some of the files (possibly in
  subdirectories) have unknown size, and therefore the directory
  size may be underestimated (and average size inaccurate, as it
  is average of the files with known sizes).
. means an error occurred while reading a subdirectory, and
  therefore the directory size may be underestimated (and average
  size inaccurate)
! means an error occurred while reading this directory

This an homage to the ncdu tool (https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu) but for rclone remotes. It is missing lots of features at the moment but is useful as it stands. Unlike ncdu it does not show excluded files.

Note that it might take some time to delete big files/directories. The UI won't respond in the meantime since the deletion is done synchronously.

For a non-interactive listing of the remote, see the tree (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_tree/) command. To just get the total size of the remote you can also use the size (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_size/) command.

rclone ncdu remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for ncdu

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Rclone nfsmount allows Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows to mount any of Rclone's cloud storage systems as a file system with FUSE.

First set up your remote using rclone config. Check it works with rclone ls etc.

On Linux and macOS, you can run mount in either foreground or background (aka daemon) mode. Mount runs in foreground mode by default. Use the --daemon flag to force background mode. On Windows you can run mount in foreground only, the flag is ignored.

In background mode rclone acts as a generic Unix mount program: the main program starts, spawns background rclone process to setup and maintain the mount, waits until success or timeout and exits with appropriate code (killing the child process if it fails).

On Linux/macOS/FreeBSD start the mount like this, where /path/to/local/mount is an empty existing directory:

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files /path/to/local/mount

On Windows you can start a mount in different ways. See below for details. If foreground mount is used interactively from a console window, rclone will serve the mount and occupy the console so another window should be used to work with the mount until rclone is interrupted e.g. by pressing Ctrl-C.

The following examples will mount to an automatically assigned drive, to specific drive letter X:, to path C:\path\parent\mount (where parent directory or drive must exist, and mount must not exist, and is not supported when mounting as a network drive), and the last example will mount as network share \\cloud\remote and map it to an automatically assigned drive:

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files *
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X:
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files C:\path\parent\mount
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files \\cloud\remote

When the program ends while in foreground mode, either via Ctrl+C or receiving a SIGINT or SIGTERM signal, the mount should be automatically stopped.

When running in background mode the user will have to stop the mount manually:

# Linux
fusermount -u /path/to/local/mount
#... or on some systems
fusermount3 -u /path/to/local/mount
# OS X or Linux when using nfsmount
umount /path/to/local/mount

The umount operation can fail, for example when the mountpoint is busy. When that happens, it is the user's responsibility to stop the mount manually.

The size of the mounted file system will be set according to information retrieved from the remote, the same as returned by the rclone about (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_about/) command. Remotes with unlimited storage may report the used size only, then an additional 1 PiB of free space is assumed. If the remote does not support (https://rclone.org/overview/#optional-features) the about feature at all, then 1 PiB is set as both the total and the free size.

To run rclone nfsmount on Windows, you will need to download and install WinFsp (http://www.secfs.net/winfsp/).

WinFsp (https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp) is an open-source Windows File System Proxy which makes it easy to write user space file systems for Windows. It provides a FUSE emulation layer which rclone uses combination with cgofuse (https://github.com/winfsp/cgofuse). Both of these packages are by Bill Zissimopoulos who was very helpful during the implementation of rclone nfsmount for Windows.

Unlike other operating systems, Microsoft Windows provides a different filesystem type for network and fixed drives. It optimises access on the assumption fixed disk drives are fast and reliable, while network drives have relatively high latency and less reliability. Some settings can also be differentiated between the two types, for example that Windows Explorer should just display icons and not create preview thumbnails for image and video files on network drives.

In most cases, rclone will mount the remote as a normal, fixed disk drive by default. However, you can also choose to mount it as a remote network drive, often described as a network share. If you mount an rclone remote using the default, fixed drive mode and experience unexpected program errors, freezes or other issues, consider mounting as a network drive instead.

When mounting as a fixed disk drive you can either mount to an unused drive letter, or to a path representing a nonexistent subdirectory of an existing parent directory or drive. Using the special value * will tell rclone to automatically assign the next available drive letter, starting with Z: and moving backward. Examples:

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files *
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X:
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files C:\path\parent\mount
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X:

Option --volname can be used to set a custom volume name for the mounted file system. The default is to use the remote name and path.

To mount as network drive, you can add option --network-mode to your nfsmount command. Mounting to a directory path is not supported in this mode, it is a limitation Windows imposes on junctions, so the remote must always be mounted to a drive letter.

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X: --network-mode

A volume name specified with --volname will be used to create the network share path. A complete UNC path, such as \\cloud\remote, optionally with path \\cloud\remote\madeup\path, will be used as is. Any other string will be used as the share part, after a default prefix \\server\. If no volume name is specified then \\server\share will be used. You must make sure the volume name is unique when you are mounting more than one drive, or else the mount command will fail. The share name will treated as the volume label for the mapped drive, shown in Windows Explorer etc, while the complete \\server\share will be reported as the remote UNC path by net use etc, just like a normal network drive mapping.

If you specify a full network share UNC path with --volname, this will implicitly set the --network-mode option, so the following two examples have same result:

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X: --network-mode
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files X: --volname \\server\share

You may also specify the network share UNC path as the mountpoint itself. Then rclone will automatically assign a drive letter, same as with * and use that as mountpoint, and instead use the UNC path specified as the volume name, as if it were specified with the --volname option. This will also implicitly set the --network-mode option. This means the following two examples have same result:

rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files \\cloud\remote
rclone nfsmount remote:path/to/files * --volname \\cloud\remote

There is yet another way to enable network mode, and to set the share path, and that is to pass the "native" libfuse/WinFsp option directly: --fuse-flag --VolumePrefix=\server\share. Note that the path must be with just a single backslash prefix in this case.

Note: In previous versions of rclone this was the only supported method.

Read more about drive mapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_mapping)

See also Limitations section below.

The FUSE emulation layer on Windows must convert between the POSIX-based permission model used in FUSE, and the permission model used in Windows, based on access-control lists (ACL).

The mounted filesystem will normally get three entries in its access-control list (ACL), representing permissions for the POSIX permission scopes: Owner, group and others. By default, the owner and group will be taken from the current user, and the built-in group "Everyone" will be used to represent others. The user/group can be customized with FUSE options "UserName" and "GroupName", e.g. -o UserName=user123 -o GroupName="Authenticated Users". The permissions on each entry will be set according to options --dir-perms and --file-perms, which takes a value in traditional Unix numeric notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File-system_permissions#Numeric_notation).

The default permissions corresponds to --file-perms 0666 --dir-perms 0777, i.e. read and write permissions to everyone. This means you will not be able to start any programs from the mount. To be able to do that you must add execute permissions, e.g. --file-perms 0777 --dir-perms 0777 to add it to everyone. If the program needs to write files, chances are you will have to enable VFS File Caching as well (see also limitations). Note that the default write permission have some restrictions for accounts other than the owner, specifically it lacks the "write extended attributes", as explained next.

The mapping of permissions is not always trivial, and the result you see in Windows Explorer may not be exactly like you expected. For example, when setting a value that includes write access for the group or others scope, this will be mapped to individual permissions "write attributes", "write data" and "append data", but not "write extended attributes". Windows will then show this as basic permission "Special" instead of "Write", because "Write" also covers the "write extended attributes" permission. When setting digit 0 for group or others, to indicate no permissions, they will still get individual permissions "read attributes", "read extended attributes" and "read permissions". This is done for compatibility reasons, e.g. to allow users without additional permissions to be able to read basic metadata about files like in Unix.

WinFsp 2021 (version 1.9) introduced a new FUSE option "FileSecurity", that allows the complete specification of file security descriptors using SDDL (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthz/security-descriptor-string-format). With this you get detailed control of the resulting permissions, compared to use of the POSIX permissions described above, and no additional permissions will be added automatically for compatibility with Unix. Some example use cases will following.

If you set POSIX permissions for only allowing access to the owner, using --file-perms 0600 --dir-perms 0700, the user group and the built-in "Everyone" group will still be given some special permissions, as described above. Some programs may then (incorrectly) interpret this as the file being accessible by everyone, for example an SSH client may warn about "unprotected private key file". You can work around this by specifying -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FA;;;OW)", which sets file all access (FA) to the owner (OW), and nothing else.

When setting write permissions then, except for the owner, this does not include the "write extended attributes" permission, as mentioned above. This may prevent applications from writing to files, giving permission denied error instead. To set working write permissions for the built-in "Everyone" group, similar to what it gets by default but with the addition of the "write extended attributes", you can specify -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FRFW;;;WD)", which sets file read (FR) and file write (FW) to everyone (WD). If file execute (FX) is also needed, then change to -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FRFWFX;;;WD)", or set file all access (FA) to get full access permissions, including delete, with -o FileSecurity="D:P(A;;FA;;;WD)".

Drives created as Administrator are not visible to other accounts, not even an account that was elevated to Administrator with the User Account Control (UAC) feature. A result of this is that if you mount to a drive letter from a Command Prompt run as Administrator, and then try to access the same drive from Windows Explorer (which does not run as Administrator), you will not be able to see the mounted drive.

If you don't need to access the drive from applications running with administrative privileges, the easiest way around this is to always create the mount from a non-elevated command prompt.

To make mapped drives available to the user account that created them regardless if elevated or not, there is a special Windows setting called linked connections (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/networking/mapped-drives-not-available-from-elevated-command#detail-to-configure-the-enablelinkedconnections-registry-entry) that can be enabled.

It is also possible to make a drive mount available to everyone on the system, by running the process creating it as the built-in SYSTEM account. There are several ways to do this: One is to use the command-line utility PsExec (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec), from Microsoft's Sysinternals suite, which has option -s to start processes as the SYSTEM account. Another alternative is to run the mount command from a Windows Scheduled Task, or a Windows Service, configured to run as the SYSTEM account. A third alternative is to use the WinFsp.Launcher infrastructure (https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp/wiki/WinFsp-Service-Architecture)). Read more in the install documentation (https://rclone.org/install/). Note that when running rclone as another user, it will not use the configuration file from your profile unless you tell it to with the --config (https://rclone.org/docs/#config-config-file) option. Note also that it is now the SYSTEM account that will have the owner permissions, and other accounts will have permissions according to the group or others scopes. As mentioned above, these will then not get the "write extended attributes" permission, and this may prevent writing to files. You can work around this with the FileSecurity option, see example above.

Note that mapping to a directory path, instead of a drive letter, does not suffer from the same limitations.

Mounting on macOS can be done either via built-in NFS server (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_nfs/), macFUSE (https://osxfuse.github.io/) (also known as osxfuse) or FUSE-T (https://www.fuse-t.org/). macFUSE is a traditional FUSE driver utilizing a macOS kernel extension (kext). FUSE-T is an alternative FUSE system which "mounts" via an NFSv4 local server.

It is highly recommended to keep the default of --no-unicode-normalization=false for all mount and serve commands on macOS. For details, see vfs-case-sensitivity (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/#vfs-case-sensitivity).

This method spins up an NFS server using serve nfs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_nfs/) command and mounts it to the specified mountpoint. If you run this in background mode using |--daemon|, you will need to send SIGTERM signal to the rclone process using |kill| command to stop the mount.

Note that --nfs-cache-handle-limit controls the maximum number of cached file handles stored by the nfsmount caching handler. This should not be set too low or you may experience errors when trying to access files. The default is 1000000, but consider lowering this limit if the server's system resource usage causes problems.

If installing macFUSE using dmg packages (https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/releases) from the website, rclone will locate the macFUSE libraries without any further intervention. If however, macFUSE is installed using the macports (https://www.macports.org/) package manager, the following addition steps are required.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib
cd /usr/local/lib
sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libfuse.2.dylib

There are some limitations, caveats, and notes about how it works. These are current as of FUSE-T version 1.0.14.

As per the FUSE-T wiki (https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t/wiki#caveats):

This means that viewing files with various tools, notably macOS Finder, will cause rlcone to update the modification time of the file. This may make rclone upload a full new copy of the file.

When mounting with --read-only, attempts to write to files will fail silently as opposed to with a clear warning as in macFUSE.

Without the use of --vfs-cache-mode this can only write files sequentially, it can only seek when reading. This means that many applications won't work with their files on an rclone mount without --vfs-cache-mode writes or --vfs-cache-mode full. See the VFS File Caching section for more info. When using NFS mount on macOS, if you don't specify |--vfs-cache-mode| the mount point will be read-only.

The bucket-based remotes (e.g. Swift, S3, Google Compute Storage, B2) do not support the concept of empty directories, so empty directories will have a tendency to disappear once they fall out of the directory cache.

When rclone mount is invoked on Unix with --daemon flag, the main rclone program will wait for the background mount to become ready or until the timeout specified by the --daemon-wait flag. On Linux it can check mount status using ProcFS so the flag in fact sets maximum time to wait, while the real wait can be less. On macOS / BSD the time to wait is constant and the check is performed only at the end. We advise you to set wait time on macOS reasonably.

Only supported on Linux, FreeBSD, OS X and Windows at the moment.

File systems expect things to be 100% reliable, whereas cloud storage systems are a long way from 100% reliable. The rclone sync/copy commands cope with this with lots of retries. However rclone nfsmount can't use retries in the same way without making local copies of the uploads. Look at the VFS File Caching for solutions to make nfsmount more reliable.

You can use the flag --attr-timeout to set the time the kernel caches the attributes (size, modification time, etc.) for directory entries.

The default is 1s which caches files just long enough to avoid too many callbacks to rclone from the kernel.

In theory 0s should be the correct value for filesystems which can change outside the control of the kernel. However this causes quite a few problems such as rclone using too much memory (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2157), rclone not serving files to samba (https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-1-39-vs-1-40-mount-issue/5112) and excessive time listing directories (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2095#issuecomment-371141147).

The kernel can cache the info about a file for the time given by --attr-timeout. You may see corruption if the remote file changes length during this window. It will show up as either a truncated file or a file with garbage on the end. With --attr-timeout 1s this is very unlikely but not impossible. The higher you set --attr-timeout the more likely it is. The default setting of "1s" is the lowest setting which mitigates the problems above.

If you set it higher (10s or 1m say) then the kernel will call back to rclone less often making it more efficient, however there is more chance of the corruption issue above.

If files don't change on the remote outside of the control of rclone then there is no chance of corruption.

This is the same as setting the attr_timeout option in mount.fuse.

Note that all the rclone filters can be used to select a subset of the files to be visible in the mount.

When running rclone nfsmount as a systemd service, it is possible to use Type=notify. In this case the service will enter the started state after the mountpoint has been successfully set up. Units having the rclone nfsmount service specified as a requirement will see all files and folders immediately in this mode.

Note that systemd runs mount units without any environment variables including PATH or HOME. This means that tilde (~) expansion will not work and you should provide --config and --cache-dir explicitly as absolute paths via rclone arguments. Since mounting requires the fusermount or fusermount3 program, rclone will use the fallback PATH of /bin:/usr/bin in this scenario. Please ensure that fusermount/fusermount3 is present on this PATH.

The core Unix program /bin/mount normally takes the -t FSTYPE argument then runs the /sbin/mount.FSTYPE helper program passing it mount options as -o key=val,... or --opt=.... Automount (classic or systemd) behaves in a similar way.

rclone by default expects GNU-style flags --key val. To run it as a mount helper you should symlink rclone binary to /sbin/mount.rclone and optionally /usr/bin/rclonefs, e.g. ln -s /usr/bin/rclone /sbin/mount.rclone. rclone will detect it and translate command-line arguments appropriately.

Now you can run classic mounts like this:

mount sftp1:subdir /mnt/data -t rclone -o vfs_cache_mode=writes,sftp_key_file=/path/to/pem

or create systemd mount units:

# /etc/systemd/system/mnt-data.mount
[Unit]
Description=Mount for /mnt/data
[Mount]
Type=rclone
What=sftp1:subdir
Where=/mnt/data
Options=rw,_netdev,allow_other,args2env,vfs-cache-mode=writes,config=/etc/rclone.conf,cache-dir=/var/rclone

optionally accompanied by systemd automount unit

# /etc/systemd/system/mnt-data.automount
[Unit]
Description=AutoMount for /mnt/data
[Automount]
Where=/mnt/data
TimeoutIdleSec=600
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

or add in /etc/fstab a line like

sftp1:subdir /mnt/data rclone rw,noauto,nofail,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,args2env,vfs_cache_mode=writes,config=/etc/rclone.conf,cache_dir=/var/cache/rclone 0 0

or use classic Automountd. Remember to provide explicit config=...,cache-dir=... as a workaround for mount units being run without HOME.

Rclone in the mount helper mode will split -o argument(s) by comma, replace _ by - and prepend -- to get the command-line flags. Options containing commas or spaces can be wrapped in single or double quotes. Any inner quotes inside outer quotes of the same type should be doubled.

Mount option syntax includes a few extra options treated specially:

• env.NAME=VALUE will set an environment variable for the mount process. This helps with Automountd and Systemd.mount which don't allow setting custom environment for mount helpers. Typically you will use env.HTTPS_PROXY=proxy.host:3128 or env.HOME=/root
• command=cmount can be used to run cmount or any other rclone command rather than the default mount.
• args2env will pass mount options to the mount helper running in background via environment variables instead of command line arguments. This allows to hide secrets from such commands as ps or pgrep.
• vv... will be transformed into appropriate --verbose=N
• standard mount options like x-systemd.automount, _netdev, nosuid and alike are intended only for Automountd and ignored by rclone.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone nfsmount remote:path /path/to/mountpoint [flags]

      --addr string                            IPaddress:Port or :Port to bind server to
      --allow-non-empty                        Allow mounting over a non-empty directory (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-other                            Allow access to other users (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-root                             Allow access to root user (not supported on Windows)
      --async-read                             Use asynchronous reads (not supported on Windows) (default true)
      --attr-timeout Duration                  Time for which file/directory attributes are cached (default 1s)
      --daemon                                 Run mount in background and exit parent process (as background output is suppressed, use --log-file with --log-format=pid,... to monitor) (not supported on Windows)
      --daemon-timeout Duration                Time limit for rclone to respond to kernel (not supported on Windows) (default 0s)
      --daemon-wait Duration                   Time to wait for ready mount from daemon (maximum time on Linux, constant sleep time on OSX/BSD) (not supported on Windows) (default 1m0s)
      --debug-fuse                             Debug the FUSE internals - needs -v
      --default-permissions                    Makes kernel enforce access control based on the file mode (not supported on Windows)
      --devname string                         Set the device name - default is remote:path
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --direct-io                              Use Direct IO, disables caching of data
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --fuse-flag stringArray                  Flags or arguments to be passed direct to libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for nfsmount
      --max-read-ahead SizeSuffix              The number of bytes that can be prefetched for sequential reads (not supported on Windows) (default 128Ki)
      --mount-case-insensitive Tristate        Tell the OS the mount is case insensitive (true) or sensitive (false) regardless of the backend (auto) (default unset)
      --network-mode                           Mount as remote network drive, instead of fixed disk drive (supported on Windows only)
      --nfs-cache-dir string                   The directory the NFS handle cache will use if set
      --nfs-cache-handle-limit int             max file handles cached simultaneously (min 5) (default 1000000)
      --nfs-cache-type memory|disk|symlink     Type of NFS handle cache to use (default memory)
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --noappledouble                          Ignore Apple Double (._) and .DS_Store files (supported on OSX only) (default true)
      --noapplexattr                           Ignore all "com.apple.*" extended attributes (supported on OSX only)
  -o, --option stringArray                     Option for libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --sudo                                   Use sudo to run the mount/umount commands as root.
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)
      --volname string                         Set the volume name (supported on Windows and OSX only)
      --write-back-cache                       Makes kernel buffer writes before sending them to rclone (without this, writethrough caching is used) (not supported on Windows)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

In the rclone config file, human-readable passwords are obscured. Obscuring them is done by encrypting them and writing them out in base64. This is not a secure way of encrypting these passwords as rclone can decrypt them - it is to prevent "eyedropping" - namely someone seeing a password in the rclone config file by accident.

Many equally important things (like access tokens) are not obscured in the config file. However it is very hard to shoulder surf a 64 character hex token.

This command can also accept a password through STDIN instead of an argument by passing a hyphen as an argument. This will use the first line of STDIN as the password not including the trailing newline.

echo "secretpassword" | rclone obscure -

If there is no data on STDIN to read, rclone obscure will default to obfuscating the hyphen itself.

If you want to encrypt the config file then please use config file encryption - see rclone config (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_config/) for more info.

rclone obscure password [flags]

  -h, --help   help for obscure

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This runs a command against a running rclone. Use the --url flag to specify an non default URL to connect on. This can be either a ":port" which is taken to mean "http://localhost:port" or a "host:port" which is taken to mean "http://host:port"

A username and password can be passed in with --user and --pass.

Note that --rc-addr, --rc-user, --rc-pass will be read also for --url, --user, --pass.

The --unix-socket flag can be used to connect over a unix socket like this

# start server on /tmp/my.socket
rclone rcd --rc-addr unix:///tmp/my.socket
# Connect to it
rclone rc --unix-socket /tmp/my.socket core/stats

Arguments should be passed in as parameter=value.

The result will be returned as a JSON object by default.

The --json parameter can be used to pass in a JSON blob as an input instead of key=value arguments. This is the only way of passing in more complicated values.

The -o/--opt option can be used to set a key "opt" with key, value options in the form -o key=value or -o key. It can be repeated as many times as required. This is useful for rc commands which take the "opt" parameter which by convention is a dictionary of strings.

-o key=value -o key2

Will place this in the "opt" value

{"key":"value", "key2","")

The -a/--arg option can be used to set strings in the "arg" value. It can be repeated as many times as required. This is useful for rc commands which take the "arg" parameter which by convention is a list of strings.

-a value -a value2

Will place this in the "arg" value

["value", "value2"]

Use --loopback to connect to the rclone instance running rclone rc. This is very useful for testing commands without having to run an rclone rc server, e.g.:

rclone rc --loopback operations/about fs=/

Use rclone rc to see a list of all possible commands.

rclone rc commands parameter [flags]

  -a, --arg stringArray      Argument placed in the "arg" array
  -h, --help                 help for rc
      --json string          Input JSON - use instead of key=value args
      --loopback             If set connect to this rclone instance not via HTTP
      --no-output            If set, don't output the JSON result
  -o, --opt stringArray      Option in the form name=value or name placed in the "opt" array
      --pass string          Password to use to connect to rclone remote control
      --unix-socket string   Path to a unix domain socket to dial to, instead of opening a TCP connection directly
      --url string           URL to connect to rclone remote control (default "http://localhost:5572/")
      --user string          Username to use to rclone remote control

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Reads from standard input (stdin) and copies it to a single remote file.

echo "hello world" | rclone rcat remote:path/to/file
ffmpeg - | rclone rcat remote:path/to/file

If the remote file already exists, it will be overwritten.

rcat will try to upload small files in a single request, which is usually more efficient than the streaming/chunked upload endpoints, which use multiple requests. Exact behaviour depends on the remote. What is considered a small file may be set through --streaming-upload-cutoff. Uploading only starts after the cutoff is reached or if the file ends before that. The data must fit into RAM. The cutoff needs to be small enough to adhere the limits of your remote, please see there. Generally speaking, setting this cutoff too high will decrease your performance.

Use the --size flag to preallocate the file in advance at the remote end and actually stream it, even if remote backend doesn't support streaming.

--size should be the exact size of the input stream in bytes. If the size of the stream is different in length to the --size passed in then the transfer will likely fail.

Note that the upload cannot be retried because the data is not stored. If the backend supports multipart uploading then individual chunks can be retried. If you need to transfer a lot of data, you may be better off caching it locally and then rclone move it to the destination which can use retries.

rclone rcat remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help       help for rcat
      --size int   File size hint to preallocate (default -1)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This runs rclone so that it only listens to remote control commands.

This is useful if you are controlling rclone via the rc API.

If you pass in a path to a directory, rclone will serve that directory for GET requests on the URL passed in. It will also open the URL in the browser when rclone is run.

See the rc documentation (https://rclone.org/rc/) for more info on the rc flags.

Use --rc-addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --rc-addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --rc-addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --rc-addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--rc-addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--rc-server-read-timeout and --rc-server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--rc-max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--rc-baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --rc-baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --rc-baseurl, so --rc-baseurl "rclone", --rc-baseurl "/rclone" and --rc-baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --rc-cert and --rc-key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --rc-client-ca also.

--rc-cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --krc-ey should be the PEM encoded private key and --rc-client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--rc-min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --rc-addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP. ### Template

--rc-template allows a user to specify a custom markup template for HTTP and WebDAV serve functions. The server exports the following markup to be used within the template to server pages:

The server also makes the following functions available so that they can be used within the template. These functions help extend the options for dynamic rendering of HTML. They can be used to render HTML based on specific conditions.

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --rc-user and --rc-pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --rc-htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser

The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

Use --rc-realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --rc-salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

rclone rcd <path to files to serve>* [flags]

  -h, --help   help for rcd

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags to control the Remote Control API

      --rc                                 Enable the remote control server
      --rc-addr stringArray                IPaddress:Port or :Port to bind server to (default localhost:5572)
      --rc-allow-origin string             Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --rc-baseurl string                  Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --rc-cert string                     TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --rc-client-ca string                Client certificate authority to verify clients with
      --rc-enable-metrics                  Enable the Prometheus metrics path at the remote control server
      --rc-files string                    Path to local files to serve on the HTTP server
      --rc-htpasswd string                 A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --rc-job-expire-duration Duration    Expire finished async jobs older than this value (default 1m0s)
      --rc-job-expire-interval Duration    Interval to check for expired async jobs (default 10s)
      --rc-key string                      TLS PEM Private key
      --rc-max-header-bytes int            Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --rc-min-tls-version string          Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --rc-no-auth                         Don't require auth for certain methods
      --rc-pass string                     Password for authentication
      --rc-realm string                    Realm for authentication
      --rc-salt string                     Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --rc-serve                           Enable the serving of remote objects
      --rc-serve-no-modtime                Don't read the modification time (can speed things up)
      --rc-server-read-timeout Duration    Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --rc-server-write-timeout Duration   Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --rc-template string                 User-specified template
      --rc-user string                     User name for authentication
      --rc-web-fetch-url string            URL to fetch the releases for webgui (default "https://api.github.com/repos/rclone/rclone-webui-react/releases/latest")
      --rc-web-gui                         Launch WebGUI on localhost
      --rc-web-gui-force-update            Force update to latest version of web gui
      --rc-web-gui-no-open-browser         Don't open the browser automatically
      --rc-web-gui-update                  Check and update to latest version of web gui

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This recursively removes any empty directories (including directories that only contain empty directories), that it finds under the path. The root path itself will also be removed if it is empty, unless you supply the --leave-root flag.

Use command rmdir (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_rmdir/) to delete just the empty directory given by path, not recurse.

This is useful for tidying up remotes that rclone has left a lot of empty directories in. For example the delete (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_delete/) command will delete files but leave the directory structure (unless used with option --rmdirs).

This will delete --checkers directories concurrently so if you have thousands of empty directories consider increasing this number.

To delete a path and any objects in it, use the purge (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_purge/) command.

rclone rmdirs remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help         help for rmdirs
      --leave-root   Do not remove root directory if empty

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

This command downloads the latest release of rclone and replaces the currently running binary. The download is verified with a hashsum and cryptographically signed signature; see the release signing docs (https://rclone.org/release_signing/) for details.

If used without flags (or with implied --stable flag), this command will install the latest stable release. However, some issues may be fixed (or features added) only in the latest beta release. In such cases you should run the command with the --beta flag, i.e. rclone selfupdate --beta. You can check in advance what version would be installed by adding the --check flag, then repeat the command without it when you are satisfied.

Sometimes the rclone team may recommend you a concrete beta or stable rclone release to troubleshoot your issue or add a bleeding edge feature. The --version VER flag, if given, will update to the concrete version instead of the latest one. If you omit micro version from VER (for example 1.53), the latest matching micro version will be used.

Upon successful update rclone will print a message that contains a previous version number. You will need it if you later decide to revert your update for some reason. Then you'll have to note the previous version and run the following command: rclone selfupdate [--beta] OLDVER. If the old version contains only dots and digits (for example v1.54.0) then it's a stable release so you won't need the --beta flag. Beta releases have an additional information similar to v1.54.0-beta.5111.06f1c0c61. (if you are a developer and use a locally built rclone, the version number will end with -DEV, you will have to rebuild it as it obviously can't be distributed).

If you previously installed rclone via a package manager, the package may include local documentation or configure services. You may wish to update with the flag --package deb or --package rpm (whichever is correct for your OS) to update these too. This command with the default --package zip will update only the rclone executable so the local manual may become inaccurate after it.

The rclone mount (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) command may or may not support extended FUSE options depending on the build and OS. selfupdate will refuse to update if the capability would be discarded.

Note: Windows forbids deletion of a currently running executable so this command will rename the old executable to 'rclone.old.exe' upon success.

Please note that this command was not available before rclone version 1.55. If it fails for you with the message unknown command "selfupdate" then you will need to update manually following the install instructions located at https://rclone.org/install/

rclone selfupdate [flags]

      --beta             Install beta release
      --check            Check for latest release, do not download
  -h, --help             help for selfupdate
      --output string    Save the downloaded binary at a given path (default: replace running binary)
      --package string   Package format: zip|deb|rpm (default: zip)
      --stable           Install stable release (this is the default)
      --version string   Install the given rclone version (default: latest)

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Serve a remote over a given protocol. Requires the use of a subcommand to specify the protocol, e.g.

rclone serve http remote:

Each subcommand has its own options which you can see in their help.

rclone serve <protocol> [opts] <remote> [flags]

  -h, --help   help for serve

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.
• rclone serve dlna (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_dlna/) - Serve remote:path over DLNA
• rclone serve docker (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_docker/) - Serve any remote on docker's volume plugin API.
• rclone serve ftp (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_ftp/) - Serve remote:path over FTP.
• rclone serve http (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_http/) - Serve the remote over HTTP.
• rclone serve nfs (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_nfs/) - Serve the remote as an NFS mount
• rclone serve restic (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_restic/) - Serve the remote for restic's REST API.
• rclone serve s3 (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_s3/) - Serve remote:path over s3.
• rclone serve sftp (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_sftp/) - Serve the remote over SFTP.
• rclone serve webdav (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_webdav/) - Serve remote:path over WebDAV.

Run a DLNA media server for media stored in an rclone remote. Many devices, such as the Xbox and PlayStation, can automatically discover this server in the LAN and play audio/video from it. VLC is also supported. Service discovery uses UDP multicast packets (SSDP) and will thus only work on LANs.

Rclone will list all files present in the remote, without filtering based on media formats or file extensions. Additionally, there is no media transcoding support. This means that some players might show files that they are not able to play back correctly.

Rclone will add external subtitle files (.srt) to videos if they have the same filename as the video file itself (except the extension), either in the same directory as the video, or in a "Subs" subdirectory.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, e.g. --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs.

Use --name to choose the friendly server name, which is by default "rclone (hostname)".

Use --log-trace in conjunction with -vv to enable additional debug logging of all UPNP traffic.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone serve dlna remote:path [flags]

      --addr string                            The ip:port or :port to bind the DLNA http server to (default ":7879")
      --announce-interval Duration             The interval between SSDP announcements (default 12m0s)
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for dlna
      --interface stringArray                  The interface to use for SSDP (repeat as necessary)
      --log-trace                              Enable trace logging of SOAP traffic
      --name string                            Name of DLNA server
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

This command implements the Docker volume plugin API allowing docker to use rclone as a data storage mechanism for various cloud providers. rclone provides docker volume plugin based on it.

To create a docker plugin, one must create a Unix or TCP socket that Docker will look for when you use the plugin and then it listens for commands from docker daemon and runs the corresponding code when necessary. Docker plugins can run as a managed plugin under control of the docker daemon or as an independent native service. For testing, you can just run it directly from the command line, for example:

sudo rclone serve docker --base-dir /tmp/rclone-volumes --socket-addr localhost:8787 -vv

Running rclone serve docker will create the said socket, listening for commands from Docker to create the necessary Volumes. Normally you need not give the --socket-addr flag. The API will listen on the unix domain socket at /run/docker/plugins/rclone.sock. In the example above rclone will create a TCP socket and a small file /etc/docker/plugins/rclone.spec containing the socket address. We use sudo because both paths are writeable only by the root user.

If you later decide to change listening socket, the docker daemon must be restarted to reconnect to /run/docker/plugins/rclone.sock or parse new /etc/docker/plugins/rclone.spec. Until you restart, any volume related docker commands will timeout trying to access the old socket. Running directly is supported on Linux only, not on Windows or MacOS. This is not a problem with managed plugin mode described in details in the full documentation (https://rclone.org/docker).

The command will create volume mounts under the path given by --base-dir (by default /var/lib/docker-volumes/rclone available only to root) and maintain the JSON formatted file docker-plugin.state in the rclone cache directory with book-keeping records of created and mounted volumes.

All mount and VFS options are submitted by the docker daemon via API, but you can also provide defaults on the command line as well as set path to the config file and cache directory or adjust logging verbosity.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone serve docker [flags]

      --allow-non-empty                        Allow mounting over a non-empty directory (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-other                            Allow access to other users (not supported on Windows)
      --allow-root                             Allow access to root user (not supported on Windows)
      --async-read                             Use asynchronous reads (not supported on Windows) (default true)
      --attr-timeout Duration                  Time for which file/directory attributes are cached (default 1s)
      --base-dir string                        Base directory for volumes (default "/var/lib/docker-volumes/rclone")
      --daemon                                 Run mount in background and exit parent process (as background output is suppressed, use --log-file with --log-format=pid,... to monitor) (not supported on Windows)
      --daemon-timeout Duration                Time limit for rclone to respond to kernel (not supported on Windows) (default 0s)
      --daemon-wait Duration                   Time to wait for ready mount from daemon (maximum time on Linux, constant sleep time on OSX/BSD) (not supported on Windows) (default 1m0s)
      --debug-fuse                             Debug the FUSE internals - needs -v
      --default-permissions                    Makes kernel enforce access control based on the file mode (not supported on Windows)
      --devname string                         Set the device name - default is remote:path
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --direct-io                              Use Direct IO, disables caching of data
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --forget-state                           Skip restoring previous state
      --fuse-flag stringArray                  Flags or arguments to be passed direct to libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for docker
      --max-read-ahead SizeSuffix              The number of bytes that can be prefetched for sequential reads (not supported on Windows) (default 128Ki)
      --mount-case-insensitive Tristate        Tell the OS the mount is case insensitive (true) or sensitive (false) regardless of the backend (auto) (default unset)
      --network-mode                           Mount as remote network drive, instead of fixed disk drive (supported on Windows only)
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --no-spec                                Do not write spec file
      --noappledouble                          Ignore Apple Double (._) and .DS_Store files (supported on OSX only) (default true)
      --noapplexattr                           Ignore all "com.apple.*" extended attributes (supported on OSX only)
  -o, --option stringArray                     Option for libfuse/WinFsp (repeat if required)
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --socket-addr string                     Address <host:port> or absolute path (default: /run/docker/plugins/rclone.sock)
      --socket-gid int                         GID for unix socket (default: current process GID) (default 1000)
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)
      --volname string                         Set the volume name (supported on Windows and OSX only)
      --write-back-cache                       Makes kernel buffer writes before sending them to rclone (without this, writethrough caching is used) (not supported on Windows)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Run a basic FTP server to serve a remote over FTP protocol. This can be viewed with a FTP client or you can make a remote of type FTP to read and write it.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, e.g. --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

If you supply the parameter --auth-proxy /path/to/program then rclone will use that program to generate backends on the fly which then are used to authenticate incoming requests. This uses a simple JSON based protocol with input on STDIN and output on STDOUT.

PLEASE NOTE: --auth-proxy and --authorized-keys cannot be used together, if --auth-proxy is set the authorized keys option will be ignored.

There is an example program bin/test_proxy.py (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/bin/test_proxy.py) in the rclone source code.

The program's job is to take a user and pass on the input and turn those into the config for a backend on STDOUT in JSON format. This config will have any default parameters for the backend added, but it won't use configuration from environment variables or command line options - it is the job of the proxy program to make a complete config.

This config generated must have this extra parameter - _root - root to use for the backend

And it may have this parameter - _obscure - comma separated strings for parameters to obscure

If password authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword"
}

If public-key authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "public_key": "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDuwESFdAe14hVS6omeyX7edc...JQdf"
}

And as an example return this on STDOUT

{
    "type": "sftp",
    "_root": "",
    "_obscure": "pass",
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword",
    "host": "sftp.example.com"
}

This would mean that an SFTP backend would be created on the fly for the user and pass/public_key returned in the output to the host given. Note that since _obscure is set to pass, rclone will obscure the pass parameter before creating the backend (which is required for sftp backends).

The program can manipulate the supplied user in any way, for example to make proxy to many different sftp backends, you could make the user be user@example.com and then set the host to example.com in the output and the user to user. For security you'd probably want to restrict the host to a limited list.

Note that an internal cache is keyed on user so only use that for configuration, don't use pass or public_key. This also means that if a user's password or public-key is changed the cache will need to expire (which takes 5 mins) before it takes effect.

This can be used to build general purpose proxies to any kind of backend that rclone supports.

rclone serve ftp remote:path [flags]

      --addr string                            IPaddress:Port or :Port to bind server to (default "localhost:2121")
      --auth-proxy string                      A program to use to create the backend from the auth
      --cert string                            TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for ftp
      --key string                             TLS PEM Private key
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --pass string                            Password for authentication (empty value allow every password)
      --passive-port string                    Passive port range to use (default "30000-32000")
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --public-ip string                       Public IP address to advertise for passive connections
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --user string                            User name for authentication (default "anonymous")
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Run a basic web server to serve a remote over HTTP. This can be viewed in a web browser or you can make a remote of type http read from it.

You can use the filter flags (e.g. --include, --exclude) to control what is served.

The server will log errors. Use -v to see access logs.

--bwlimit will be respected for file transfers. Use --stats to control the stats printing.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--server-read-timeout and --server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --baseurl, so --baseurl "rclone", --baseurl "/rclone" and --baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --cert and --key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --client-ca also.

--cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --key should be the PEM encoded private key and --client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP. ### Template

--template allows a user to specify a custom markup template for HTTP and WebDAV serve functions. The server exports the following markup to be used within the template to server pages:

The server also makes the following functions available so that they can be used within the template. These functions help extend the options for dynamic rendering of HTML. They can be used to render HTML based on specific conditions.

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser

The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

Use --realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

If you supply the parameter --auth-proxy /path/to/program then rclone will use that program to generate backends on the fly which then are used to authenticate incoming requests. This uses a simple JSON based protocol with input on STDIN and output on STDOUT.

PLEASE NOTE: --auth-proxy and --authorized-keys cannot be used together, if --auth-proxy is set the authorized keys option will be ignored.

There is an example program bin/test_proxy.py (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/bin/test_proxy.py) in the rclone source code.

The program's job is to take a user and pass on the input and turn those into the config for a backend on STDOUT in JSON format. This config will have any default parameters for the backend added, but it won't use configuration from environment variables or command line options - it is the job of the proxy program to make a complete config.

This config generated must have this extra parameter - _root - root to use for the backend

And it may have this parameter - _obscure - comma separated strings for parameters to obscure

If password authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword"
}

If public-key authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "public_key": "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDuwESFdAe14hVS6omeyX7edc...JQdf"
}

And as an example return this on STDOUT

{
    "type": "sftp",
    "_root": "",
    "_obscure": "pass",
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword",
    "host": "sftp.example.com"
}

This would mean that an SFTP backend would be created on the fly for the user and pass/public_key returned in the output to the host given. Note that since _obscure is set to pass, rclone will obscure the pass parameter before creating the backend (which is required for sftp backends).

The program can manipulate the supplied user in any way, for example to make proxy to many different sftp backends, you could make the user be user@example.com and then set the host to example.com in the output and the user to user. For security you'd probably want to restrict the host to a limited list.

Note that an internal cache is keyed on user so only use that for configuration, don't use pass or public_key. This also means that if a user's password or public-key is changed the cache will need to expire (which takes 5 mins) before it takes effect.

This can be used to build general purpose proxies to any kind of backend that rclone supports.

rclone serve http remote:path [flags]

      --addr stringArray                       IPaddress:Port, :Port or [unix://]/path/to/socket to bind server to (default [127.0.0.1:8080])
      --allow-origin string                    Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --auth-proxy string                      A program to use to create the backend from the auth
      --baseurl string                         Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --cert string                            TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --client-ca string                       Client certificate authority to verify clients with
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for http
      --htpasswd string                        A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --key string                             TLS PEM Private key
      --max-header-bytes int                   Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --min-tls-version string                 Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --pass string                            Password for authentication
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --realm string                           Realm for authentication
      --salt string                            Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --server-read-timeout Duration           Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --server-write-timeout Duration          Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --template string                        User-specified template
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --user string                            User name for authentication
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Create an NFS server that serves the given remote over the network.

This implements an NFSv3 server to serve any rclone remote via NFS.

The primary purpose for this command is to enable the mount command (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) on recent macOS versions where installing FUSE is very cumbersome.

This server does not implement any authentication so any client will be able to access the data. To limit access, you can use serve nfs on the loopback address or rely on secure tunnels (such as SSH) or use firewalling.

For this reason, by default, a random TCP port is chosen and the loopback interface is used for the listening address by default; meaning that it is only available to the local machine. If you want other machines to access the NFS mount over local network, you need to specify the listening address and port using the --addr flag.

Modifying files through the NFS protocol requires VFS caching. Usually you will need to specify --vfs-cache-mode in order to be able to write to the mountpoint (full is recommended). If you don't specify VFS cache mode, the mount will be read-only.

--nfs-cache-type controls the type of the NFS handle cache. By default this is memory where new handles will be randomly allocated when needed. These are stored in memory. If the server is restarted the handle cache will be lost and connected NFS clients will get stale handle errors.

--nfs-cache-type disk uses an on disk NFS handle cache. Rclone hashes the path of the object and stores it in a file named after the hash. These hashes are stored on disk the directory controlled by --cache-dir or the exact directory may be specified with --nfs-cache-dir. Using this means that the NFS server can be restarted at will without affecting the connected clients.

--nfs-cache-type symlink is similar to --nfs-cache-type disk in that it uses an on disk cache, but the cache entries are held as symlinks. Rclone will use the handle of the underlying file as the NFS handle which improves performance. This sort of cache can't be backed up and restored as the underlying handles will change. This is Linux only.

--nfs-cache-handle-limit controls the maximum number of cached NFS handles stored by the caching handler. This should not be set too low or you may experience errors when trying to access files. The default is 1000000, but consider lowering this limit if the server's system resource usage causes problems. This is only used by the memory type cache.

To serve NFS over the network use following command:

rclone serve nfs remote: --addr 0.0.0.0:$PORT --vfs-cache-mode=full

This specifies a port that can be used in the mount command. To mount the server under Linux/macOS, use the following command:

mount -t nfs -o port=$PORT,mountport=$PORT,tcp $HOSTNAME:/ path/to/mountpoint

Where $PORT is the same port number used in the serve nfs command and $HOSTNAME is the network address of the machine that serve nfs was run on.

This command is only available on Unix platforms.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone serve nfs remote:path [flags]

      --addr string                            IPaddress:Port or :Port to bind server to
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for nfs
      --nfs-cache-dir string                   The directory the NFS handle cache will use if set
      --nfs-cache-handle-limit int             max file handles cached simultaneously (min 5) (default 1000000)
      --nfs-cache-type memory|disk|symlink     Type of NFS handle cache to use (default memory)
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Run a basic web server to serve a remote over restic's REST backend API over HTTP. This allows restic to use rclone as a data storage mechanism for cloud providers that restic does not support directly.

Restic (https://restic.net/) is a command-line program for doing backups.

The server will log errors. Use -v to see access logs.

--bwlimit will be respected for file transfers. Use --stats to control the stats printing.

First set up a remote for your chosen cloud provider (https://rclone.org/docs/#configure).

Once you have set up the remote, check it is working with, for example "rclone lsd remote:". You may have called the remote something other than "remote:" - just substitute whatever you called it in the following instructions.

Now start the rclone restic server

rclone serve restic -v remote:backup

Where you can replace "backup" in the above by whatever path in the remote you wish to use.

By default this will serve on "localhost:8080" you can change this with use of the --addr flag.

You might wish to start this server on boot.

Adding --cache-objects=false will cause rclone to stop caching objects returned from the List call. Caching is normally desirable as it speeds up downloading objects, saves transactions and uses very little memory.

Now you can follow the restic instructions (http://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/030_preparing_a_new_repo.html#rest-server) on setting up restic.

Note that you will need restic 0.8.2 or later to interoperate with rclone.

For the example above you will want to use "http://localhost:8080/" as the URL for the REST server.

For example:

$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/
$ export RESTIC_PASSWORD=yourpassword
$ restic init
created restic backend 8b1a4b56ae at rest:http://localhost:8080/

Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access
the repository. Losing your password means that your data is
irrecoverably lost.
$ restic backup /path/to/files/to/backup
scan [/path/to/files/to/backup]
scanned 189 directories, 312 files in 0:00
[0:00] 100.00%  38.128 MiB / 38.128 MiB  501 / 501 items  0 errors  ETA 0:00
duration: 0:00
snapshot 45c8fdd8 saved

Note that you can use the endpoint to host multiple repositories. Do this by adding a directory name or path after the URL. Note that these must end with /. Eg

$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/user1repo/
# backup user1 stuff
$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/user2repo/
# backup user2 stuff

The--private-repos flag can be used to limit users to repositories starting with a path of /<username>/.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--server-read-timeout and --server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --baseurl, so --baseurl "rclone", --baseurl "/rclone" and --baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --cert and --key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --client-ca also.

--cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --key should be the PEM encoded private key and --client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP. ### Authentication

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser

The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

Use --realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

rclone serve restic remote:path [flags]

      --addr stringArray                IPaddress:Port, :Port or [unix://]/path/to/socket to bind server to (default [127.0.0.1:8080])
      --allow-origin string             Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --append-only                     Disallow deletion of repository data
      --baseurl string                  Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --cache-objects                   Cache listed objects (default true)
      --cert string                     TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --client-ca string                Client certificate authority to verify clients with
  -h, --help                            help for restic
      --htpasswd string                 A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --key string                      TLS PEM Private key
      --max-header-bytes int            Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --min-tls-version string          Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --pass string                     Password for authentication
      --private-repos                   Users can only access their private repo
      --realm string                    Realm for authentication
      --salt string                     Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --server-read-timeout Duration    Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --server-write-timeout Duration   Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --stdio                           Run an HTTP2 server on stdin/stdout
      --user string                     User name for authentication

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

serve s3 implements a basic s3 server that serves a remote via s3. This can be viewed with an s3 client, or you can make an s3 type remote (https://rclone.org/s3/) to read and write to it with rclone.

serve s3 is considered Experimental so use with care.

S3 server supports Signature Version 4 authentication. Just use --auth-key accessKey,secretKey and set the Authorization header correctly in the request. (See the AWS docs (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/signature-version-4.html)).

--auth-key can be repeated for multiple auth pairs. If --auth-key is not provided then serve s3 will allow anonymous access.

Please note that some clients may require HTTPS endpoints. See the SSL docs for more information.

This command uses the VFS directory cache. All the functionality will work with --vfs-cache-mode off. Using --vfs-cache-mode full (or writes) can be used to cache objects locally to improve performance.

Use --force-path-style=false if you want to use the bucket name as a part of the hostname (such as mybucket.local)

Use --etag-hash if you want to change the hash uses for the ETag. Note that using anything other than MD5 (the default) is likely to cause problems for S3 clients which rely on the Etag being the MD5.

For a simple set up, to serve remote:path over s3, run the server like this:

rclone serve s3 --auth-key ACCESS_KEY_ID,SECRET_ACCESS_KEY remote:path

For example, to use a simple folder in the filesystem, run the server with a command like this:

rclone serve s3 --auth-key ACCESS_KEY_ID,SECRET_ACCESS_KEY local:/path/to/folder

The rclone.conf for the server could look like this:

[local]
type = local

The local configuration is optional though. If you run the server with a remote:path like /path/to/folder (without the local: prefix and without an rclone.conf file), rclone will fall back to a default configuration, which will be visible as a warning in the logs. But it will run nonetheless.

This will be compatible with an rclone (client) remote configuration which is defined like this:

[serves3]
type = s3
provider = Rclone
endpoint = http://127.0.0.1:8080/
access_key_id = ACCESS_KEY_ID
secret_access_key = SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
use_multipart_uploads = false

Note that setting disable_multipart_uploads = true is to work around a bug which will be fixed in due course.

When uploading multipart files serve s3 holds all the parts in memory (see #7453 (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/7453)). This is a limitaton of the library rclone uses for serving S3 and will hopefully be fixed at some point.

Multipart server side copies do not work (see #7454 (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/7454)). These take a very long time and eventually fail. The default threshold for multipart server side copies is 5G which is the maximum it can be, so files above this side will fail to be server side copied.

For a current list of serve s3 bugs see the serve s3 (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/labels/serve%20s3) bug category on GitHub.

serve s3 will treat all directories in the root as buckets and ignore all files in the root. You can use CreateBucket to create folders under the root, but you can't create empty folders under other folders not in the root.

When using PutObject or DeleteObject, rclone will automatically create or clean up empty folders. If you don't want to clean up empty folders automatically, use --no-cleanup.

When using ListObjects, rclone will use / when the delimiter is empty. This reduces backend requests with no effect on most operations, but if the delimiter is something other than / and empty, rclone will do a full recursive search of the backend, which can take some time.

Versioning is not currently supported.

Metadata will only be saved in memory other than the rclone mtime metadata which will be set as the modification time of the file.

serve s3 currently supports the following operations.

• Bucket

  • ListBuckets
  • CreateBucket
  • DeleteBucket

• Object

  • HeadObject
  • ListObjects
  • GetObject
  • PutObject
  • DeleteObject
  • DeleteObjects
  • CreateMultipartUpload
  • CompleteMultipartUpload
  • AbortMultipartUpload
  • CopyObject
  • UploadPart

Other operations will return error Unimplemented.

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser

The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

Use --realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--server-read-timeout and --server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --baseurl, so --baseurl "rclone", --baseurl "/rclone" and --baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --cert and --key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --client-ca also.

--cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --key should be the PEM encoded private key and --client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP. ## VFS - Virtual File System

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

rclone serve s3 remote:path [flags]

      --addr stringArray                       IPaddress:Port, :Port or [unix://]/path/to/socket to bind server to (default [127.0.0.1:8080])
      --allow-origin string                    Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --auth-key stringArray                   Set key pair for v4 authorization: access_key_id,secret_access_key
      --auth-proxy string                      A program to use to create the backend from the auth
      --baseurl string                         Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --cert string                            TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --client-ca string                       Client certificate authority to verify clients with
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --etag-hash string                       Which hash to use for the ETag, or auto or blank for off (default "MD5")
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --force-path-style                       If true use path style access if false use virtual hosted style (default true) (default true)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for s3
      --htpasswd string                        A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --key string                             TLS PEM Private key
      --max-header-bytes int                   Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --min-tls-version string                 Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-cleanup                             Not to cleanup empty folder after object is deleted
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --pass string                            Password for authentication
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --realm string                           Realm for authentication
      --salt string                            Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --server-read-timeout Duration           Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --server-write-timeout Duration          Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --user string                            User name for authentication
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Run an SFTP server to serve a remote over SFTP. This can be used with an SFTP client or you can make a remote of type sftp to use with it.

You can use the filter flags (e.g. --include, --exclude) to control what is served.

The server will respond to a small number of shell commands, mainly md5sum, sha1sum and df, which enable it to provide support for checksums and the about feature when accessed from an sftp remote.

Note that this server uses standard 32 KiB packet payload size, which means you must not configure the client to expect anything else, e.g. with the chunk_size (https://rclone.org/sftp/#sftp-chunk-size) option on an sftp remote.

The server will log errors. Use -v to see access logs.

--bwlimit will be respected for file transfers. Use --stats to control the stats printing.

You must provide some means of authentication, either with --user/--pass, an authorized keys file (specify location with --authorized-keys - the default is the same as ssh), an --auth-proxy, or set the --no-auth flag for no authentication when logging in.

If you don't supply a host --key then rclone will generate rsa, ecdsa and ed25519 variants, and cache them for later use in rclone's cache directory (see rclone help flags cache-dir) in the "serve-sftp" directory.

By default the server binds to localhost:2022 - if you want it to be reachable externally then supply --addr :2022 for example.

This also supports being run with socket activation, in which case it will listen on the first passed FD. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand:

systemd-socket-activate -l 2222 -- rclone serve sftp :local:vfs/

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 2222 over TCP.

Note that the default of --vfs-cache-mode off is fine for the rclone sftp backend, but it may not be with other SFTP clients.

If --stdio is specified, rclone will serve SFTP over stdio, which can be used with sshd via ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, for example:

restrict,command="rclone serve sftp --stdio ./photos" ssh-rsa ...

On the client you need to set --transfers 1 when using --stdio. Otherwise multiple instances of the rclone server are started by OpenSSH which can lead to "corrupted on transfer" errors. This is the case because the client chooses indiscriminately which server to send commands to while the servers all have different views of the state of the filing system.

The "restrict" in authorized_keys prevents SHA1SUMs and MD5SUMs from being used. Omitting "restrict" and using --sftp-path-override to enable checksumming is possible but less secure and you could use the SFTP server provided by OpenSSH in this case.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

If you supply the parameter --auth-proxy /path/to/program then rclone will use that program to generate backends on the fly which then are used to authenticate incoming requests. This uses a simple JSON based protocol with input on STDIN and output on STDOUT.

PLEASE NOTE: --auth-proxy and --authorized-keys cannot be used together, if --auth-proxy is set the authorized keys option will be ignored.

There is an example program bin/test_proxy.py (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/bin/test_proxy.py) in the rclone source code.

The program's job is to take a user and pass on the input and turn those into the config for a backend on STDOUT in JSON format. This config will have any default parameters for the backend added, but it won't use configuration from environment variables or command line options - it is the job of the proxy program to make a complete config.

This config generated must have this extra parameter - _root - root to use for the backend

And it may have this parameter - _obscure - comma separated strings for parameters to obscure

If password authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword"
}

If public-key authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "public_key": "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDuwESFdAe14hVS6omeyX7edc...JQdf"
}

And as an example return this on STDOUT

{
    "type": "sftp",
    "_root": "",
    "_obscure": "pass",
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword",
    "host": "sftp.example.com"
}

This would mean that an SFTP backend would be created on the fly for the user and pass/public_key returned in the output to the host given. Note that since _obscure is set to pass, rclone will obscure the pass parameter before creating the backend (which is required for sftp backends).

The program can manipulate the supplied user in any way, for example to make proxy to many different sftp backends, you could make the user be user@example.com and then set the host to example.com in the output and the user to user. For security you'd probably want to restrict the host to a limited list.

Note that an internal cache is keyed on user so only use that for configuration, don't use pass or public_key. This also means that if a user's password or public-key is changed the cache will need to expire (which takes 5 mins) before it takes effect.

This can be used to build general purpose proxies to any kind of backend that rclone supports.

rclone serve sftp remote:path [flags]

      --addr string                            IPaddress:Port or :Port to bind server to (default "localhost:2022")
      --auth-proxy string                      A program to use to create the backend from the auth
      --authorized-keys string                 Authorized keys file (default "~/.ssh/authorized_keys")
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for sftp
      --key stringArray                        SSH private host key file (Can be multi-valued, leave blank to auto generate)
      --no-auth                                Allow connections with no authentication if set
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --pass string                            Password for authentication
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --stdio                                  Run an sftp server on stdin/stdout
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --user string                            User name for authentication
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Run a basic WebDAV server to serve a remote over HTTP via the WebDAV protocol. This can be viewed with a WebDAV client, through a web browser, or you can make a remote of type WebDAV to read and write it.

This controls the ETag header. Without this flag the ETag will be based on the ModTime and Size of the object.

If this flag is set to "auto" then rclone will choose the first supported hash on the backend or you can use a named hash such as "MD5" or "SHA-1". Use the hashsum (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_hashsum/) command to see the full list.

WebDAV shared folder can be mapped as a drive on Windows, however the default settings prevent it. Windows will fail to connect to the server using insecure Basic authentication. It will not even display any login dialog. Windows requires SSL / HTTPS connection to be used with Basic. If you try to connect via Add Network Location Wizard you will get the following error: "The folder you entered does not appear to be valid. Please choose another". However, you still can connect if you set the following registry key on a client machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINEto 2. The BasicAuthLevel can be set to the following values: 0 - Basic authentication disabled 1 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL connections only 2 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL connections and for non-SSL connections If required, increase the FileSizeLimitInBytes to a higher value. Navigate to the Services interface, then restart the WebClient service.

Navigate to following registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER[14.0/15.0/16.0] Create a new DWORD BasicAuthLevel with value 2. 0 - Basic authentication disabled 1 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL connections only 2 - Basic authentication enabled for SSL and for non-SSL connections

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/powerpoint/office-opens-blank-from-sharepoint

You can serve the webdav on a unix socket like this:

rclone serve webdav --addr unix:///tmp/my.socket remote:path

and connect to it like this using rclone and the webdav backend:

rclone --webdav-unix-socket /tmp/my.socket --webdav-url http://localhost lsf :webdav:

Note that there is no authentication on http protocol - this is expected to be done by the permissions on the socket.

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--server-read-timeout and --server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --baseurl, so --baseurl "rclone", --baseurl "/rclone" and --baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --cert and --key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --client-ca also.

--cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --key should be the PEM encoded private key and --client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP. ### Template

--template allows a user to specify a custom markup template for HTTP and WebDAV serve functions. The server exports the following markup to be used within the template to server pages:

The server also makes the following functions available so that they can be used within the template. These functions help extend the options for dynamic rendering of HTML. They can be used to render HTML based on specific conditions.

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser

The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

Use --realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

This command uses the VFS layer. This adapts the cloud storage objects that rclone uses into something which looks much more like a disk filing system.

Cloud storage objects have lots of properties which aren't like disk files - you can't extend them or write to the middle of them, so the VFS layer has to deal with that. Because there is no one right way of doing this there are various options explained below.

The VFS layer also implements a directory cache - this caches info about files and directories (but not the data) in memory.

Using the --dir-cache-time flag, you can control how long a directory should be considered up to date and not refreshed from the backend. Changes made through the VFS will appear immediately or invalidate the cache.

--dir-cache-time duration   Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
--poll-interval duration    Time to wait between polling for changes. Must be smaller than dir-cache-time. Only on supported remotes. Set to 0 to disable (default 1m0s)

However, changes made directly on the cloud storage by the web interface or a different copy of rclone will only be picked up once the directory cache expires if the backend configured does not support polling for changes. If the backend supports polling, changes will be picked up within the polling interval.

You can send a SIGHUP signal to rclone for it to flush all directory caches, regardless of how old they are. Assuming only one rclone instance is running, you can reset the cache like this:

kill -SIGHUP $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use rclone rc to flush the whole directory cache:

rclone rc vfs/forget

Or individual files or directories:

rclone rc vfs/forget file=path/to/file dir=path/to/dir

The --buffer-size flag determines the amount of memory, that will be used to buffer data in advance.

Each open file will try to keep the specified amount of data in memory at all times. The buffered data is bound to one open file and won't be shared.

This flag is a upper limit for the used memory per open file. The buffer will only use memory for data that is downloaded but not not yet read. If the buffer is empty, only a small amount of memory will be used.

The maximum memory used by rclone for buffering can be up to --buffer-size * open files.

These flags control the VFS file caching options. File caching is necessary to make the VFS layer appear compatible with a normal file system. It can be disabled at the cost of some compatibility.

For example you'll need to enable VFS caching if you want to read and write simultaneously to a file. See below for more details.

Note that the VFS cache is separate from the cache backend and you may find that you need one or the other or both.

--cache-dir string                     Directory rclone will use for caching.
--vfs-cache-mode CacheMode             Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
--vfs-cache-max-age duration           Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
--vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix        Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix  Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
--vfs-cache-poll-interval duration     Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
--vfs-write-back duration              Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)

If run with -vv rclone will print the location of the file cache. The files are stored in the user cache file area which is OS dependent but can be controlled with --cache-dir or setting the appropriate environment variable.

The cache has 4 different modes selected by --vfs-cache-mode. The higher the cache mode the more compatible rclone becomes at the cost of using disk space.

Note that files are written back to the remote only when they are closed and if they haven't been accessed for --vfs-write-back seconds. If rclone is quit or dies with files that haven't been uploaded, these will be uploaded next time rclone is run with the same flags.

If using --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size note that the cache may exceed these quotas for two reasons. Firstly because it is only checked every --vfs-cache-poll-interval. Secondly because open files cannot be evicted from the cache. When --vfs-cache-max-size or --vfs-cache-min-free-size is exceeded, rclone will attempt to evict the least accessed files from the cache first. rclone will start with files that haven't been accessed for the longest. This cache flushing strategy is efficient and more relevant files are likely to remain cached.

The --vfs-cache-max-age will evict files from the cache after the set time since last access has passed. The default value of 1 hour will start evicting files from cache that haven't been accessed for 1 hour. When a cached file is accessed the 1 hour timer is reset to 0 and will wait for 1 more hour before evicting. Specify the time with standard notation, s, m, h, d, w .

You should not run two copies of rclone using the same VFS cache with the same or overlapping remotes if using --vfs-cache-mode > off. This can potentially cause data corruption if you do. You can work around this by giving each rclone its own cache hierarchy with --cache-dir. You don't need to worry about this if the remotes in use don't overlap.

In this mode (the default) the cache will read directly from the remote and write directly to the remote without caching anything on disk.

This will mean some operations are not possible

• Files can't be opened for both read AND write
• Files opened for write can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files open for read with O_TRUNC will be opened write only
• Files open for write only will behave as if O_TRUNC was supplied
• Open modes O_APPEND, O_TRUNC are ignored
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

This is very similar to "off" except that files opened for read AND write will be buffered to disk. This means that files opened for write will be a lot more compatible, but uses the minimal disk space.

These operations are not possible

• Files opened for write only can't be seeked
• Existing files opened for write must have O_TRUNC set
• Files opened for write only will ignore O_APPEND, O_TRUNC
• If an upload fails it can't be retried

In this mode files opened for read only are still read directly from the remote, write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first.

This mode should support all normal file system operations.

If an upload fails it will be retried at exponentially increasing intervals up to 1 minute.

In this mode all reads and writes are buffered to and from disk. When data is read from the remote this is buffered to disk as well.

In this mode the files in the cache will be sparse files and rclone will keep track of which bits of the files it has downloaded.

So if an application only reads the starts of each file, then rclone will only buffer the start of the file. These files will appear to be their full size in the cache, but they will be sparse files with only the data that has been downloaded present in them.

This mode should support all normal file system operations and is otherwise identical to --vfs-cache-mode writes.

When reading a file rclone will read --buffer-size plus --vfs-read-ahead bytes ahead. The --buffer-size is buffered in memory whereas the --vfs-read-ahead is buffered on disk.

When using this mode it is recommended that --buffer-size is not set too large and --vfs-read-ahead is set large if required.

IMPORTANT not all file systems support sparse files. In particular FAT/exFAT do not. Rclone will perform very badly if the cache directory is on a filesystem which doesn't support sparse files and it will log an ERROR message if one is detected.

Various parts of the VFS use fingerprinting to see if a local file copy has changed relative to a remote file. Fingerprints are made from:

• size
• modification time
• hash

where available on an object.

On some backends some of these attributes are slow to read (they take an extra API call per object, or extra work per object).

For example hash is slow with the local and sftp backends as they have to read the entire file and hash it, and modtime is slow with the s3, swift, ftp and qinqstor backends because they need to do an extra API call to fetch it.

If you use the --vfs-fast-fingerprint flag then rclone will not include the slow operations in the fingerprint. This makes the fingerprinting less accurate but much faster and will improve the opening time of cached files.

If you are running a vfs cache over local, s3 or swift backends then using this flag is recommended.

Note that if you change the value of this flag, the fingerprints of the files in the cache may be invalidated and the files will need to be downloaded again.

When rclone reads files from a remote it reads them in chunks. This means that rather than requesting the whole file rclone reads the chunk specified. This can reduce the used download quota for some remotes by requesting only chunks from the remote that are actually read, at the cost of an increased number of requests.

These flags control the chunking:

--vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix        Read the source objects in chunks (default 128M)
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix  Max chunk doubling size (default off)
--vfs-read-chunk-streams int            The number of parallel streams to read at once

The chunking behaves differently depending on the --vfs-read-chunk-streams parameter.

Rclone will start reading a chunk of size --vfs-read-chunk-size, and then double the size for each read. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit is specified, and greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, the chunk size for each open file will get doubled only until the specified value is reached. If the value is "off", which is the default, the limit is disabled and the chunk size will grow indefinitely.

With --vfs-read-chunk-size 100M and --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 0 the following parts will be downloaded: 0-100M, 100M-200M, 200M-300M, 300M-400M and so on. When --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 500M is specified, the result would be 0-100M, 100M-300M, 300M-700M, 700M-1200M, 1200M-1700M and so on.

Setting --vfs-read-chunk-size to 0 or "off" disables chunked reading.

The chunks will not be buffered in memory.

Rclone reads --vfs-read-chunk-streams chunks of size --vfs-read-chunk-size concurrently. The size for each read will stay constant.

This improves performance performance massively on high latency links or very high bandwidth links to high performance object stores.

Some experimentation will be needed to find the optimum values of --vfs-read-chunk-size and --vfs-read-chunk-streams as these will depend on the backend in use and the latency to the backend.

For high performance object stores (eg AWS S3) a reasonable place to start might be --vfs-read-chunk-streams 16 and --vfs-read-chunk-size 4M. In testing with AWS S3 the performance scaled roughly as the --vfs-read-chunk-streams setting.

Similar settings should work for high latency links, but depending on the latency they may need more --vfs-read-chunk-streams in order to get the throughput.

These flags may be used to enable/disable features of the VFS for performance or other reasons. See also the chunked reading feature.

In particular S3 and Swift benefit hugely from the --no-modtime flag (or use --use-server-modtime for a slightly different effect) as each read of the modification time takes a transaction.

--no-checksum     Don't compare checksums on up/download.
--no-modtime      Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up).
--no-seek         Don't allow seeking in files.
--read-only       Only allow read-only access.

Sometimes rclone is delivered reads or writes out of order. Rather than seeking rclone will wait a short time for the in sequence read or write to come in. These flags only come into effect when not using an on disk cache file.

--vfs-read-wait duration   Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
--vfs-write-wait duration  Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

When using VFS write caching (--vfs-cache-mode with value writes or full), the global flag --transfers can be set to adjust the number of parallel uploads of modified files from the cache (the related global flag --checkers has no effect on the VFS).

--transfers int  Number of file transfers to run in parallel (default 4)

Linux file systems are case-sensitive: two files can differ only by case, and the exact case must be used when opening a file.

File systems in modern Windows are case-insensitive but case-preserving: although existing files can be opened using any case, the exact case used to create the file is preserved and available for programs to query. It is not allowed for two files in the same directory to differ only by case.

Usually file systems on macOS are case-insensitive. It is possible to make macOS file systems case-sensitive but that is not the default.

The --vfs-case-insensitive VFS flag controls how rclone handles these two cases. If its value is "false", rclone passes file names to the remote as-is. If the flag is "true" (or appears without a value on the command line), rclone may perform a "fixup" as explained below.

The user may specify a file name to open/delete/rename/etc with a case different than what is stored on the remote. If an argument refers to an existing file with exactly the same name, then the case of the existing file on the disk will be used. However, if a file name with exactly the same name is not found but a name differing only by case exists, rclone will transparently fixup the name. This fixup happens only when an existing file is requested. Case sensitivity of file names created anew by rclone is controlled by the underlying remote.

Note that case sensitivity of the operating system running rclone (the target) may differ from case sensitivity of a file system presented by rclone (the source). The flag controls whether "fixup" is performed to satisfy the target.

If the flag is not provided on the command line, then its default value depends on the operating system where rclone runs: "true" on Windows and macOS, "false" otherwise. If the flag is provided without a value, then it is "true".

The --no-unicode-normalization flag controls whether a similar "fixup" is performed for filenames that differ but are canonically equivalent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence) with respect to unicode. Unicode normalization can be particularly helpful for users of macOS, which prefers form NFD instead of the NFC used by most other platforms. It is therefore highly recommended to keep the default of false on macOS, to avoid encoding compatibility issues.

In the (probably unlikely) event that a directory has multiple duplicate filenames after applying case and unicode normalization, the --vfs-block-norm-dupes flag allows hiding these duplicates. This comes with a performance tradeoff, as rclone will have to scan the entire directory for duplicates when listing a directory. For this reason, it is recommended to leave this disabled if not needed. However, macOS users may wish to consider using it, as otherwise, if a remote directory contains both NFC and NFD versions of the same filename, an odd situation will occur: both versions of the file will be visible in the mount, and both will appear to be editable, however, editing either version will actually result in only the NFD version getting edited under the hood. --vfs-block- norm-dupes prevents this confusion by detecting this scenario, hiding the duplicates, and logging an error, similar to how this is handled in rclone sync.

This flag allows you to manually set the statistics about the filing system. It can be useful when those statistics cannot be read correctly automatically.

--vfs-disk-space-total-size    Manually set the total disk space size (example: 256G, default: -1)

Some backends, most notably S3, do not report the amount of bytes used. If you need this information to be available when running df on the filesystem, then pass the flag --vfs-used-is-size to rclone. With this flag set, instead of relying on the backend to report this information, rclone will scan the whole remote similar to rclone size and compute the total used space itself.

WARNING. Contrary to rclone size, this flag ignores filters so that the result is accurate. However, this is very inefficient and may cost lots of API calls resulting in extra charges. Use it as a last resort and only with caching.

If you supply the parameter --auth-proxy /path/to/program then rclone will use that program to generate backends on the fly which then are used to authenticate incoming requests. This uses a simple JSON based protocol with input on STDIN and output on STDOUT.

PLEASE NOTE: --auth-proxy and --authorized-keys cannot be used together, if --auth-proxy is set the authorized keys option will be ignored.

There is an example program bin/test_proxy.py (https://github.com/rclone/rclone/blob/master/bin/test_proxy.py) in the rclone source code.

The program's job is to take a user and pass on the input and turn those into the config for a backend on STDOUT in JSON format. This config will have any default parameters for the backend added, but it won't use configuration from environment variables or command line options - it is the job of the proxy program to make a complete config.

This config generated must have this extra parameter - _root - root to use for the backend

And it may have this parameter - _obscure - comma separated strings for parameters to obscure

If password authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword"
}

If public-key authentication was used by the client, input to the proxy process (on STDIN) would look similar to this:

{
    "user": "me",
    "public_key": "AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDuwESFdAe14hVS6omeyX7edc...JQdf"
}

And as an example return this on STDOUT

{
    "type": "sftp",
    "_root": "",
    "_obscure": "pass",
    "user": "me",
    "pass": "mypassword",
    "host": "sftp.example.com"
}

This would mean that an SFTP backend would be created on the fly for the user and pass/public_key returned in the output to the host given. Note that since _obscure is set to pass, rclone will obscure the pass parameter before creating the backend (which is required for sftp backends).

The program can manipulate the supplied user in any way, for example to make proxy to many different sftp backends, you could make the user be user@example.com and then set the host to example.com in the output and the user to user. For security you'd probably want to restrict the host to a limited list.

Note that an internal cache is keyed on user so only use that for configuration, don't use pass or public_key. This also means that if a user's password or public-key is changed the cache will need to expire (which takes 5 mins) before it takes effect.

This can be used to build general purpose proxies to any kind of backend that rclone supports.

rclone serve webdav remote:path [flags]

      --addr stringArray                       IPaddress:Port, :Port or [unix://]/path/to/socket to bind server to (default [127.0.0.1:8080])
      --allow-origin string                    Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --auth-proxy string                      A program to use to create the backend from the auth
      --baseurl string                         Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --cert string                            TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --client-ca string                       Client certificate authority to verify clients with
      --dir-cache-time Duration                Time to cache directory entries for (default 5m0s)
      --dir-perms FileMode                     Directory permissions (default 777)
      --disable-dir-list                       Disable HTML directory list on GET request for a directory
      --etag-hash string                       Which hash to use for the ETag, or auto or blank for off
      --file-perms FileMode                    File permissions (default 666)
      --gid uint32                             Override the gid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
  -h, --help                                   help for webdav
      --htpasswd string                        A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --key string                             TLS PEM Private key
      --max-header-bytes int                   Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --min-tls-version string                 Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --no-checksum                            Don't compare checksums on up/download
      --no-modtime                             Don't read/write the modification time (can speed things up)
      --no-seek                                Don't allow seeking in files
      --pass string                            Password for authentication
      --poll-interval Duration                 Time to wait between polling for changes, must be smaller than dir-cache-time and only on supported remotes (set 0 to disable) (default 1m0s)
      --read-only                              Only allow read-only access
      --realm string                           Realm for authentication
      --salt string                            Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --server-read-timeout Duration           Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --server-write-timeout Duration          Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --template string                        User-specified template
      --uid uint32                             Override the uid field set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 1000)
      --umask FileMode                         Override the permission bits set by the filesystem (not supported on Windows) (default 002)
      --user string                            User name for authentication
      --vfs-block-norm-dupes                   If duplicate filenames exist in the same directory (after normalization), log an error and hide the duplicates (may have a performance cost)
      --vfs-cache-max-age Duration             Max time since last access of objects in the cache (default 1h0m0s)
      --vfs-cache-max-size SizeSuffix          Max total size of objects in the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-min-free-space SizeSuffix    Target minimum free space on the disk containing the cache (default off)
      --vfs-cache-mode CacheMode               Cache mode off|minimal|writes|full (default off)
      --vfs-cache-poll-interval Duration       Interval to poll the cache for stale objects (default 1m0s)
      --vfs-case-insensitive                   If a file name not found, find a case insensitive match
      --vfs-disk-space-total-size SizeSuffix   Specify the total space of disk (default off)
      --vfs-fast-fingerprint                   Use fast (less accurate) fingerprints for change detection
      --vfs-read-ahead SizeSuffix              Extra read ahead over --buffer-size when using cache-mode full
      --vfs-read-chunk-size SizeSuffix         Read the source objects in chunks (default 128Mi)
      --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit SizeSuffix   If greater than --vfs-read-chunk-size, double the chunk size after each chunk read, until the limit is reached ('off' is unlimited) (default off)
      --vfs-read-chunk-streams int             The number of parallel streams to read at once
      --vfs-read-wait Duration                 Time to wait for in-sequence read before seeking (default 20ms)
      --vfs-refresh                            Refreshes the directory cache recursively in the background on start
      --vfs-used-is-size rclone size           Use the rclone size algorithm for Used size
      --vfs-write-back Duration                Time to writeback files after last use when using cache (default 5s)
      --vfs-write-wait Duration                Time to wait for in-sequence write before giving error (default 1s)

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

• rclone serve (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve/) - Serve a remote over a protocol.

Changes storage tier or class at remote if supported. Few cloud storage services provides different storage classes on objects, for example AWS S3 and Glacier, Azure Blob storage - Hot, Cool and Archive, Google Cloud Storage, Regional Storage, Nearline, Coldline etc.

Note that, certain tier changes make objects not available to access immediately. For example tiering to archive in azure blob storage makes objects in frozen state, user can restore by setting tier to Hot/Cool, similarly S3 to Glacier makes object inaccessible.true

You can use it to tier single object

rclone settier Cool remote:path/file

Or use rclone filters to set tier on only specific files

rclone --include "*.txt" settier Hot remote:path/dir

Or just provide remote directory and all files in directory will be tiered

rclone settier tier remote:path/dir

rclone settier tier remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help   help for settier

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Rclone test is used to run test commands.

Select which test command you want with the subcommand, eg

rclone test memory remote:

Each subcommand has its own options which you can see in their help.

NB Be careful running these commands, they may do strange things so reading their documentation first is recommended.

  -h, --help   help for test

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.
• rclone test changenotify (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_changenotify/) - Log any change notify requests for the remote passed in.
• rclone test histogram (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_histogram/) - Makes a histogram of file name characters.
• rclone test info (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_info/) - Discovers file name or other limitations for paths.
• rclone test makefile (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_makefile/) - Make files with random contents of the size given
• rclone test makefiles (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_makefiles/) - Make a random file hierarchy in a directory
• rclone test memory (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test_memory/) - Load all the objects at remote:path into memory and report memory stats.

  -h, --help                     help for changenotify
      --poll-interval Duration   Time to wait between polling for changes (default 10s)

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

This command outputs JSON which shows the histogram of characters used in filenames in the remote:path specified.

The data doesn't contain any identifying information but is useful for the rclone developers when developing filename compression.

rclone test histogram [remote:path] [flags]

  -h, --help   help for histogram

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

Discovers what filenames and upload methods are possible to write to the paths passed in and how long they can be. It can take some time. It will write test files into the remote:path passed in. It outputs a bit of go code for each one.

NB this can create undeletable files and other hazards - use with care

rclone test info [remote:path]+ [flags]

      --all                    Run all tests
      --check-base32768        Check can store all possible base32768 characters
      --check-control          Check control characters
      --check-length           Check max filename length
      --check-normalization    Check UTF-8 Normalization
      --check-streaming        Check uploads with indeterminate file size
  -h, --help                   help for info
      --keep-test-files        Keep test files after execution
      --upload-wait Duration   Wait after writing a file (default 0s)
      --write-json string      Write results to file

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

      --ascii      Fill files with random ASCII printable bytes only
      --chargen    Fill files with a ASCII chargen pattern
  -h, --help       help for makefile
      --pattern    Fill files with a periodic pattern
      --seed int   Seed for the random number generator (0 for random) (default 1)
      --sparse     Make the files sparse (appear to be filled with ASCII 0x00)
      --zero       Fill files with ASCII 0x00

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

      --ascii                      Fill files with random ASCII printable bytes only
      --chargen                    Fill files with a ASCII chargen pattern
      --files int                  Number of files to create (default 1000)
      --files-per-directory int    Average number of files per directory (default 10)
  -h, --help                       help for makefiles
      --max-depth int              Maximum depth of directory hierarchy (default 10)
      --max-file-size SizeSuffix   Maximum size of files to create (default 100)
      --max-name-length int        Maximum size of file names (default 12)
      --min-file-size SizeSuffix   Minimum size of file to create
      --min-name-length int        Minimum size of file names (default 4)
      --pattern                    Fill files with a periodic pattern
      --seed int                   Seed for the random number generator (0 for random) (default 1)
      --sparse                     Make the files sparse (appear to be filled with ASCII 0x00)
      --zero                       Fill files with ASCII 0x00

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

  -h, --help   help for memory

See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

• rclone test (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_test/) - Run a test command

Set the modification time on file(s) as specified by remote:path to have the current time.

If remote:path does not exist then a zero sized file will be created, unless --no-create or --recursive is provided.

If --recursive is used then recursively sets the modification time on all existing files that is found under the path. Filters are supported, and you can test with the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag.

If --timestamp is used then sets the modification time to that time instead of the current time. Times may be specified as one of:

• 'YYMMDD' - e.g. 17.10.30
• 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS' - e.g. 2006-01-02T15:04:05
• 'YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSS' - e.g. 2006-01-02T15:04:05.123456789

Note that value of --timestamp is in UTC. If you want local time then add the --localtime flag.

rclone touch remote:path [flags]

  -h, --help               help for touch
      --localtime          Use localtime for timestamp, not UTC
  -C, --no-create          Do not create the file if it does not exist (implied with --recursive)
  -R, --recursive          Recursively touch all files
  -t, --timestamp string   Use specified time instead of the current time of day

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Important flags useful for most commands

  -n, --dry-run         Do a trial run with no permanent changes
  -i, --interactive     Enable interactive mode
  -v, --verbose count   Print lots more stuff (repeat for more)

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

Lists the contents of a remote in a similar way to the unix tree command.

For example

$ rclone tree remote:path
/
├── file1
├── file2
├── file3
└── subdir
    ├── file4
    └── file5

1 directories, 5 files

You can use any of the filtering options with the tree command (e.g. --include and --exclude. You can also use --fast-list.

The tree command has many options for controlling the listing which are compatible with the tree command, for example you can include file sizes with --size. Note that not all of them have short options as they conflict with rclone's short options.

For a more interactive navigation of the remote see the ncdu (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_ncdu/) command.

rclone tree remote:path [flags]

  -a, --all             All files are listed (list . files too)
  -d, --dirs-only       List directories only
      --dirsfirst       List directories before files (-U disables)
      --full-path       Print the full path prefix for each file
  -h, --help            help for tree
      --level int       Descend only level directories deep
  -D, --modtime         Print the date of last modification.
      --noindent        Don't print indentation lines
      --noreport        Turn off file/directory count at end of tree listing
  -o, --output string   Output to file instead of stdout
  -p, --protections     Print the protections for each file.
  -Q, --quote           Quote filenames with double quotes.
  -s, --size            Print the size in bytes of each file.
      --sort string     Select sort: name,version,size,mtime,ctime
      --sort-ctime      Sort files by last status change time
  -t, --sort-modtime    Sort files by last modification time
  -r, --sort-reverse    Reverse the order of the sort
  -U, --unsorted        Leave files unsorted
      --version         Sort files alphanumerically by version

Options shared with other commands are described next. See the global flags page (https://rclone.org/flags/) for global options not listed here.

Flags for filtering directory listings

      --delete-excluded                     Delete files on dest excluded from sync
      --exclude stringArray                 Exclude files matching pattern
      --exclude-from stringArray            Read file exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --exclude-if-present stringArray      Exclude directories if filename is present
      --files-from stringArray              Read list of source-file names from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --files-from-raw stringArray          Read list of source-file names from file without any processing of lines (use - to read from stdin)
  -f, --filter stringArray                  Add a file filtering rule
      --filter-from stringArray             Read file filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --ignore-case                         Ignore case in filters (case insensitive)
      --include stringArray                 Include files matching pattern
      --include-from stringArray            Read file include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --max-age Duration                    Only transfer files younger than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --max-depth int                       If set limits the recursion depth to this (default -1)
      --max-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files smaller than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)
      --metadata-exclude stringArray        Exclude metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-exclude-from stringArray   Read metadata exclude patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-filter stringArray         Add a metadata filtering rule
      --metadata-filter-from stringArray    Read metadata filtering patterns from a file (use - to read from stdin)
      --metadata-include stringArray        Include metadatas matching pattern
      --metadata-include-from stringArray   Read metadata include patterns from file (use - to read from stdin)
      --min-age Duration                    Only transfer files older than this in s or suffix ms|s|m|h|d|w|M|y (default off)
      --min-size SizeSuffix                 Only transfer files bigger than this in KiB or suffix B|K|M|G|T|P (default off)

Flags for listing directories

      --default-time Time   Time to show if modtime is unknown for files and directories (default 2000-01-01T00:00:00Z)
      --fast-list           Use recursive list if available; uses more memory but fewer transactions

• rclone (https://rclone.org/commands/rclone/) - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.

rclone normally syncs or copies directories. However, if the source remote points to a file, rclone will just copy that file. The destination remote must point to a directory - rclone will give the error Failed to create file system for "remote:file": is a file not a directory if it isn't.

For example, suppose you have a remote with a file in called test.jpg, then you could copy just that file like this

rclone copy remote:test.jpg /tmp/download

The file test.jpg will be placed inside /tmp/download.

This is equivalent to specifying

rclone copy --files-from /tmp/files remote: /tmp/download

Where /tmp/files contains the single line

test.jpg

It is recommended to use copy when copying individual files, not sync. They have pretty much the same effect but copy will use a lot less memory.

The syntax of the paths passed to the rclone command are as follows.

This refers to the local file system.

On Windows \ may be used instead of / in local paths only, non local paths must use /. See local filesystem (https://rclone.org/local/#paths-on-windows) documentation for more about Windows-specific paths.

These paths needn't start with a leading / - if they don't then they will be relative to the current directory.

This refers to a directory path/to/dir on remote: as defined in the config file (configured with rclone config).

On most backends this is refers to the same directory as remote:path/to/dir and that format should be preferred. On a very small number of remotes (FTP, SFTP, Dropbox for business) this will refer to a different directory. On these, paths without a leading / will refer to your "home" directory and paths with a leading / will refer to the root.

This is an advanced form for creating remotes on the fly. backend should be the name or prefix of a backend (the type in the config file) and all the configuration for the backend should be provided on the command line (or in environment variables).

Here are some examples:

rclone lsd --http-url https://pub.rclone.org :http:

To list all the directories in the root of https://pub.rclone.org/.

rclone lsf --http-url https://example.com :http:path/to/dir

To list files and directories in https://example.com/path/to/dir/

rclone copy --http-url https://example.com :http:path/to/dir /tmp/dir

To copy files and directories in https://example.com/path/to/dir to /tmp/dir.

rclone copy --sftp-host example.com :sftp:path/to/dir /tmp/dir

To copy files and directories from example.com in the relative directory path/to/dir to /tmp/dir using sftp.