rclone cheat sheet

A list of useful commands for the rclone command line tool.

Full documentation: https://rclone.org

Installation

Installation using the official script: See https://rclone.org/install/.

Installation on mac using brew:

brew install rclone

Configuration

rclone config

Standard steps: create a new remote, skip client_id and client_secret, leave option tenant empty, advanced config: no, use web browser to authenticate automatically.

Check if rclone can see remote files:

rclone lsd remote_name:

Copy files

<source> and <destination> are the names of the remotes. If the folder is local, leave out this label.

1. Dry run

rclone copy \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  "<destination>:<path/to/destination>" \
  --progress \
  --dry-run

2. Real copy

rclone copy \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  "<destination>:<path/to/destination>" \
  --progress \
  --transfers 4 \
  --checkers 8

Settings: 4 transfers for parallel downloading (useful for larger files); 8 checkers for fast directory scanning.

For large files, you can make rclone more stubborn (defaults are 3 and 10):

--retries 5 --low-level-retries 20

3. Verify

Optional. May take a while.

rclone check \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  "<destination>:<path/to/destination>"

Move files from remote to external volume

This makes a copy and deletes the original on the remote.

rclone move \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  "<destination>:<path/to/destination>" \
  --progress

Delete from remote

1. Dry run

rclone delete \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  --dry-run

2. Real deletion

rclone delete \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>" \
  --progress

3. Remove empty folders

Remove all empty child dirs and root dir (if empty):

rclone rmdirs \
  "<source>:<path/to/source>"