Rclone - Swiss army knife of cloud storage

Nov 15, 2022 · 1 min read · backup file transfer synchronization cli  ·
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Rclone is a command line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces, supporting over 40 cloud storage products.

Rclone allows to copy, synchronize, backup files and directories with remote storages in the cloud. In this regards, Rclone is the counterpart of rsync. While rsync works over a SSH connection, Rclone interfaces directly with the online APIs of cloud storage platforms such as Amazon S3, Google Drive or Microsoft Azure and OneDrive (and many more).

A nice feature of Rclone is that it allows to mount a remote storage on a local directory, which makes it possible to operate on remote files as they would be in a local directory. Additionally, it can manage the synchronization towards encrypted data on the remote storage. In this way, the remote storage never sees any unencrypted file, making Rclone suitable for backing up files on untrusted remote storages.

Finally, RClone supports the encryption of its own configuration file, which adds an additional layer of security to the usage of the program, since the configuration file can be securely backed up on untrusted locations.

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