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Documentation Rclone Usage 2019-02-25

Configure

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

Usage

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

Its syntax is like this

Syntax: [options] subcommand <parameters> <parameters...>

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

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

Subcommands

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 /local/path remote:path # syncs /local/path to the remote

The main rclone commands with most used first

See the commands index for the full list.

Copying single files

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.

Syntax of remote paths

The syntax of the paths passed to the rclone command are as follows.

/path/to/dir

This refers to the local file system.

On Windows only \ may be used instead of / in local paths
only, non local paths must use /.

These paths needn't start with a leading / - if they don't then they
will be relative to the current directory.

remote:path/to/dir

This refers to a directory path/to/dir on remote: as defined in
the config file (configured with rclone config).

remote:/path/to/dir

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.

:backend:path/to/dir

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.

Quoting and the shell

When you are typing commands to your computer you are using something
called the command line shell. This interprets various characters in
an OS specific way.

Here are some gotchas which may help users unfamiliar with the shell rules

Linux / OSX

If your names have spaces or shell metacharacters (eg *, ?, $,
', " etc) then you must quote them. Use single quotes ' by default.

rclone copy 'Important files?' remote:backup

If you want to send a ' you will need to use ", eg

rclone copy "O'Reilly Reviews" remote:backup

The rules for quoting metacharacters are complicated and if you want
the full details you'll have to consult the manual page for your
shell.

Windows

If your names have spaces in you need to put them in ", eg

rclone copy "E:\folder name\folder name\folder name" remote:backup

If you are using the root directory on its own then don't quote it
(see #464 for why), eg

rclone copy E:\ remote:backup

Copying files or directories with : in the names

rclone uses : to mark a remote name. This is, however, a valid
filename component in non-Windows OSes. The remote name parser will
only search for a : up to the first / so if you need to act on a
file or directory like this then use the full path starting with a
/, or use ./ as a current directory prefix.

So to sync a directory called sync:me to a remote called remote: use

rclone sync ./sync:me remote:path

or

rclone sync /full/path/to/sync:me remote:path

Server Side Copy

Most remotes (but not all - see the
overview) support server side copy.

This means if you want to copy one folder to another then rclone won't
download all the files and re-upload them; it will instruct the server
to copy them in place.

Eg

rclone copy s3:oldbucket s3:newbucket

Will copy the contents of oldbucket to newbucket without
downloading and re-uploading.

Remotes which don't support server side copy will download and
re-upload in this case.

Server side copies are used with sync and copy and will be
identified in the log when using the -v flag. The move command
may also use them if remote doesn't support server side move directly.
This is done by issuing a server side copy then a delete which is much
quicker than a download and re-upload.

Server side copies will only be attempted if the remote names are the
same.

This can be used when scripting to make aged backups efficiently, eg

rclone sync remote:current-backup remote:previous-backup
rclone sync /path/to/files remote:current-backup

Options

Rclone has a number of options to control its behaviour.

Options that take parameters can have the values passed in two ways,
--option=value or --option value. However boolean (true/false)
options behave slightly differently to the other options in that
--boolean sets the option to true and the absence of the flag sets
it to false. It is also possible to specify --boolean=false or
--boolean=true. Note that --boolean false is not valid - this is
parsed as --boolean and the false is parsed as an extra command
line argument for rclone.

Options which use TIME use the go time parser. A duration string is a
possibly signed sequence of decimal numbers, each with optional
fraction and a unit suffix, such as "300ms", "-1.5h" or "2h45m". Valid
time units are "ns", "us" (or "µs"), "ms", "s", "m", "h".

Options which use SIZE use kByte by default. However, a suffix of b
for bytes, k for kBytes, M for MBytes, G for GBytes, T for
TBytes and P for PBytes may be used. These are the binary units, eg
1, 2**10, 2**20, 2**30 respectively.

--backup-dir=DIR

When using sync, copy or move any files which would have been
overwritten or deleted are moved in their original hierarchy into this
directory.

If --suffix is set, then the moved files will have the suffix added
to them. If there is a file with the same path (after the suffix has
been added) in DIR, then it will be overwritten.

The remote in use must support server side move or copy and you must
use the same remote as the destination of the sync. The backup
directory must not overlap the destination directory.

For example

rclone sync /path/to/local remote:current --backup-dir remote:old

will sync /path/to/local to remote:current, but for any files
which would have been updated or deleted will be stored in
remote:old.

If running rclone from a script you might want to use today's date as
the directory name passed to --backup-dir to store the old files, or
you might want to pass --suffix with today's date.

See --compare-dest and --copy-dest.

--bind string

Local address to bind to for outgoing connections. This can be an
IPv4 address (1.2.3.4), an IPv6 address (1234::789A) or host name. If
the host name doesn't resolve or resolves to more than one IP address
it will give an error.

--bwlimit=BANDWIDTH_SPEC

This option controls the bandwidth limit. Limits can be specified
in two ways: As a single limit, or as a timetable.

Single limits last for the duration of the session. To use a single limit,
specify the desired bandwidth in kBytes/s, or use a suffix b|k|M|G. The
default is 0 which means to not limit bandwidth.

For example, to limit bandwidth usage to 10 MBytes/s use --bwlimit 10M

It is also possible to specify a "timetable" of limits, which will cause
certain limits to be applied at certain times. To specify a timetable, format your
entries as "WEEKDAY-HH:MM,BANDWIDTH WEEKDAY-HH:MM,BANDWIDTH..." where:
WEEKDAY is optional element.
It could be written as whole world or only using 3 first characters.
HH:MM is an hour from 00:00 to 23:59.

An example of a typical timetable to avoid link saturation during daytime
working hours could be:

--bwlimit "08:00,512 12:00,10M 13:00,512 18:00,30M 23:00,off"

In this example, the transfer bandwidth will be every day set to 512kBytes/sec at 8am.
At noon, it will raise to 10Mbytes/s, and drop back to 512kBytes/sec at 1pm.
At 6pm, the bandwidth limit will be set to 30MBytes/s, and at 11pm it will be
completely disabled (full speed). Anything between 11pm and 8am will remain
unlimited.

An example of timetable with WEEKDAY could be:

--bwlimit "Mon-00:00,512 Fri-23:59,10M Sat-10:00,1M Sun-20:00,off"

It mean that, the transfer bandwidth will be set to 512kBytes/sec on Monday.
It will raise to 10Mbytes/s before the end of Friday.
At 10:00 on Sunday it will be set to 1Mbyte/s.
From 20:00 at Sunday will be unlimited.

Timeslots without weekday are extended to whole week.
So this one example:

--bwlimit "Mon-00:00,512 12:00,1M Sun-20:00,off"

Is equal to this:

--bwlimit "Mon-00:00,512Mon-12:00,1M Tue-12:00,1M Wed-12:00,1M Thu-12:00,1M Fri-12:00,1M Sat-12:00,1M Sun-12:00,1M Sun-20:00,off"

Bandwidth limits only apply to the data transfer. They don't apply to the
bandwidth of the directory listings etc.

Note that the units are Bytes/s, not Bits/s. Typically connections are
measured in Bits/s - to convert divide by 8. For example, let's say
you have a 10 Mbit/s connection and you wish rclone to use half of it

  • 5 Mbit/s. This is 5/8 = 0.625MByte/s so you would use a --bwlimit 0.625M parameter for rclone.

On Unix systems (Linux, MacOS, …) the bandwidth limiter can be toggled by
sending a SIGUSR2 signal to rclone. This allows to remove the limitations
of a long running rclone transfer and to restore it back to the value specified
with --bwlimit quickly when needed. Assuming there is only one rclone instance
running, you can toggle the limiter like this:

kill -SIGUSR2 $(pidof rclone)

If you configure rclone with a remote control then you can use
change the bwlimit dynamically:

rclone rc core/bwlimit rate=1M

--buffer-size=SIZE

Use this sized buffer to speed up file transfers. Each --transfer
will use this much memory for buffering.

When using mount or cmount each open file descriptor will use this much
memory for buffering.
See the mount documentation for more details.

Set to 0 to disable the buffering for the minimum memory usage.

Note that the memory allocation of the buffers is influenced by the
--use-mmap flag.

--checkers=N

The number of checkers to run in parallel. Checkers do the equality
checking of files during a sync. For some storage systems (eg S3,
Swift, Dropbox) this can take a significant amount of time so they are
run in parallel.

The default is to run 8 checkers in parallel.

-c, --checksum

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to
see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check
the file hash and size to determine if files are equal.

This is useful when the remote doesn't support setting modified time
and a more accurate sync is desired than just checking the file size.

This is very useful when transferring between remotes which store the
same hash type on the object, eg Drive and Swift. For details of which
remotes support which hash type see the table in the overview
section.

Eg rclone --checksum sync s3:/bucket swift:/bucket would run much
quicker than without the --checksum flag.

When using this flag, rclone won't update mtimes of remote files if
they are incorrect as it would normally.

--compare-dest=DIR

When using sync, copy or move DIR is checked in addition to the
destination for files. If a file identical to the source is found that
file is NOT copied from source. This is useful to copy just files that
have changed since the last backup.

You must use the same remote as the destination of the sync. The
compare directory must not overlap the destination directory.

See --copy-dest and --backup-dir.

--config=CONFIG_FILE

Specify the location of the rclone config file.

Normally the config file is in your home directory as a file called
.config/rclone/rclone.conf (or .rclone.conf if created with an
older version). If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set it will be at
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rclone/rclone.conf.

If there is a file rclone.conf in the same directory as the rclone
executable it will be preferred. This file must be created manually
for Rclone to use it, it will never be created automatically.

If you run rclone config file you will see where the default
location is for you.

Use this flag to override the config location, eg rclone --config=".myconfig" .config.

--contimeout=TIME

Set the connection timeout. This should be in go time format which
looks like 5s for 5 seconds, 10m for 10 minutes, or 3h30m.

The connection timeout is the amount of time rclone will wait for a
connection to go through to a remote object storage system. It is
1m by default.

--copy-dest=DIR

When using sync, copy or move DIR is checked in addition to the
destination for files. If a file identical to the source is found that
file is server side copied from DIR to the destination. This is useful
for incremental backup.

The remote in use must support server side copy and you must
use the same remote as the destination of the sync. The compare
directory must not overlap the destination directory.

See --compare-dest and --backup-dir.

--dedupe-mode MODE

Mode to run dedupe command in. One of interactive, skip, first, newest, oldest, rename. The default is interactive. See the dedupe command for more information as to what these options mean.

--disable FEATURE,FEATURE,...

This disables a comma separated list of optional features. For example
to disable server side move and server side copy use:

--disable move,copy

The features can be put in any case.

To see a list of which features can be disabled use:

--disable help

See the overview features and
optional features to get an idea of
which feature does what.

This flag can be useful for debugging and in exceptional circumstances
(eg Google Drive limiting the total volume of Server Side Copies to
100GB/day).

-n, --dry-run

Do a trial run with no permanent changes. Use this to see what rclone
would do without actually doing it. Useful when setting up the sync
command which deletes files in the destination.

--expect-continue-timeout=TIME

This specifies the amount of time to wait for a server's first
response headers after fully writing the request headers if the
request has an "Expect: 100-continue" header. Not all backends support
using this.

Zero means no timeout and causes the body to be sent immediately,
without waiting for the server to approve. This time does not include
the time to send the request header.

The default is 1s. Set to 0 to disable.

--error-on-no-transfer

By default, rclone will exit with return code 0 if there were no errors.

This option allows rclone to return exit code 9 if no files were transferred
between the source and destination. This allows using rclone in scripts, and
triggering follow-on actions if data was copied, or skipping if not.

NB: Enabling this option turns a usually non-fatal error into a potentially
fatal one - please check and adjust your scripts accordingly!

--header

Add an HTTP header for all transactions. The flag can be repeated to
add multiple headers.

If you want to add headers only for uploads use --header-upload and
if you want to add headers only for downloads use --header-download.

This flag is supported for all HTTP based backends even those not
supported by --header-upload and --header-download so may be used
as a workaround for those with care.

rclone ls remote:test --header "X-Rclone: Foo" --header "X-LetMeIn: Yes"

--header-download

Add an HTTP header for all download transactions. The flag can be repeated to
add multiple headers.

rclone sync s3:test/src ~/dst --header-download "X-Amz-Meta-Test: Foo" --header-download "X-Amz-Meta-Test2: Bar"

See the Github issue here for
currently supported backends.

--header-upload

Add an HTTP header for all upload transactions. The flag can be repeated to add
multiple headers.

rclone sync ~/src s3:test/dst --header-upload "Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='cool.html'" --header-upload "X-Amz-Meta-Test: FooBar"

See the Github issue here for
currently supported backends.

--ignore-case-sync

Using this option will cause rclone to ignore the case of the files
when synchronizing so files will not be copied/synced when the
existing filenames are the same, even if the casing is different.

--ignore-checksum

Normally rclone will check that the checksums of transferred files
match, and give an error "corrupted on transfer" if they don't.

You can use this option to skip that check. You should only use it if
you have had the "corrupted on transfer" error message and you are
sure you might want to transfer potentially corrupted data.

--ignore-existing

Using this option will make rclone unconditionally skip all files
that exist on the destination, no matter the content of these files.

While this isn't a generally recommended option, it can be useful
in cases where your files change due to encryption. However, it cannot
correct partial transfers in case a transfer was interrupted.

--ignore-size

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to
see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check
only the modification time. If --checksum is set then it only
checks the checksum.

It will also cause rclone to skip verifying the sizes are the same
after transfer.

This can be useful for transferring files to and from OneDrive which
occasionally misreports the size of image files (see
#399 for more info).

-I, --ignore-times

Using this option will cause rclone to unconditionally upload all
files regardless of the state of files on the destination.

Normally rclone would skip any files that have the same
modification time and are the same size (or have the same checksum if
using --checksum).

--immutable

Treat source and destination files as immutable and disallow
modification.

With this option set, files will be created and deleted as requested,
but existing files will never be updated. If an existing file does
not match between the source and destination, rclone will give the error
Source and destination exist but do not match: immutable file modified.

Note that only commands which transfer files (e.g. sync, copy,
move) are affected by this behavior, and only modification is
disallowed. Files may still be deleted explicitly (e.g. delete,
purge) or implicitly (e.g. sync, move). Use copy --immutable
if it is desired to avoid deletion as well as modification.

This can be useful as an additional layer of protection for immutable
or append-only data sets (notably backup archives), where modification
implies corruption and should not be propagated.

--leave-root

During rmdirs it will not remove root directory, even if it's empty.

--log-file=FILE

Log all of rclone's output to FILE. This is not active by default.
This can be useful for tracking down problems with syncs in
combination with the -v flag. See the Logging section
for more info.

Note that if you are using the logrotate program to manage rclone's
logs, then you should use the copytruncate option as rclone doesn't
have a signal to rotate logs.

--log-format LIST

Comma separated list of log format options. date, time, microseconds, longfile, shortfile, UTC. The default is "date,time".

--log-level LEVEL

This sets the log level for rclone. The default log level is NOTICE.

DEBUG is equivalent to -vv. It outputs lots of debug info - useful
for bug reports and really finding out what rclone is doing.

INFO is equivalent to -v. It outputs information about each transfer
and prints stats once a minute by default.

NOTICE is the default log level if no logging flags are supplied. It
outputs very little when things are working normally. It outputs
warnings and significant events.

ERROR is equivalent to -q. It only outputs error messages.

--use-json-log

This switches the log format to JSON for rclone. The fields of json log
are level, msg, source, time.

--low-level-retries NUMBER

This controls the number of low level retries rclone does.

A low level retry is used to retry a failing operation - typically one
HTTP request. This might be uploading a chunk of a big file for
example. You will see low level retries in the log with the -v
flag.

This shouldn't need to be changed from the default in normal operations.
However, if you get a lot of low level retries you may wish
to reduce the value so rclone moves on to a high level retry (see the
--retries flag) quicker.

Disable low level retries with --low-level-retries 1.

--max-backlog=N

This is the maximum allowable backlog of files in a sync/copy/move
queued for being checked or transferred.

This can be set arbitrarily large. It will only use memory when the
queue is in use. Note that it will use in the order of N kB of memory
when the backlog is in use.

Setting this large allows rclone to calculate how many files are
pending more accurately, give a more accurate estimated finish
time and make --order-by work more accurately.

Setting this small will make rclone more synchronous to the listings
of the remote which may be desirable.

--max-delete=N

This tells rclone not to delete more than N files. If that limit is
exceeded then a fatal error will be generated and rclone will stop the
operation in progress.

--max-depth=N

This modifies the recursion depth for all the commands except purge.

So if you do rclone --max-depth 1 ls remote:path you will see only
the files in the top level directory. Using --max-depth 2 means you
will see all the files in first two directory levels and so on.

For historical reasons the lsd command defaults to using a
--max-depth of 1 - you can override this with the command line flag.

You can use this command to disable recursion (with --max-depth 1).

Note that if you use this with sync and --delete-excluded the
files not recursed through are considered excluded and will be deleted
on the destination. Test first with --dry-run if you are not sure
what will happen.

--max-duration=TIME

Rclone will stop scheduling new transfers when it has run for the
duration specified.

Defaults to off.

When the limit is reached any existing transfers will complete.

Rclone won't exit with an error if the transfer limit is reached.

--max-transfer=SIZE

Rclone will stop transferring when it has reached the size specified.
Defaults to off.

When the limit is reached all transfers will stop immediately.

Rclone will exit with exit code 8 if the transfer limit is reached.

--cutoff-mode=hard|soft|cautious

This modifies the behavior of --max-transfer
Defaults to --cutoff-mode=hard.

Specifying --cutoff-mode=hard will stop transferring immediately
when Rclone reaches the limit.

Specifying --cutoff-mode=soft will stop starting new transfers
when Rclone reaches the limit.

Specifying --cutoff-mode=cautious will try to prevent Rclone
from reaching the limit.

--modify-window=TIME

When checking whether a file has been modified, this is the maximum
allowed time difference that a file can have and still be considered
equivalent.

The default is 1ns unless this is overridden by a remote. For
example OS X only stores modification times to the nearest second so
if you are reading and writing to an OS X filing system this will be
1s by default.

This command line flag allows you to override that computed default.

--multi-thread-cutoff=SIZE

When downloading files to the local backend above this size, rclone
will use multiple threads to download the file. (default 250M)

Rclone preallocates the file (using fallocate(FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE)
on unix or NTSetInformationFile on Windows both of which takes no
time) then each thread writes directly into the file at the correct
place. This means that rclone won't create fragmented or sparse files
and there won't be any assembly time at the end of the transfer.

The number of threads used to download is controlled by
--multi-thread-streams.

Use -vv if you wish to see info about the threads.

This will work with the sync/copy/move commands and friends
copyto/moveto. Multi thread downloads will be used with rclone mount and rclone serve if --vfs-cache-mode is set to writes or
above.

NB that this only works for a local destination but will work
with any source.

NB that multi thread copies are disabled for local to local copies
as they are faster without unless --multi-thread-streams is set
explicitly.

NB on Windows using multi-thread downloads will cause the
resulting files to be sparse.
Use --local-no-sparse to disable sparse files (which may cause long
delays at the start of downloads) or disable multi-thread downloads
with --multi-thread-streams 0

--multi-thread-streams=N

When using multi thread downloads (see above --multi-thread-cutoff)
this sets the maximum number of streams to use. Set to 0 to disable
multi thread downloads. (Default 4)

Exactly how many streams rclone uses for the download depends on the
size of the file. To calculate the number of download streams Rclone
divides the size of the file by the --multi-thread-cutoff and rounds
up, up to the maximum set with --multi-thread-streams.

So if --multi-thread-cutoff 250MB and --multi-thread-streams 4 are
in effect (the defaults):

  • 0MB.250MB files will be downloaded with 1 stream
  • 250MB..500MB files will be downloaded with 2 streams
  • 500MB..750MB files will be downloaded with 3 streams
  • 750MB+ files will be downloaded with 4 streams

--no-check-dest

The --no-check-dest can be used with move or copy and it causes
rclone not to check the destination at all when copying files.

This means that:

  • the destination is not listed minimising the API calls
  • files are always transferred
  • this can cause duplicates on remotes which allow it (eg Google Drive)
  • --retries 1 is recommended otherwise you'll transfer everything again on a retry

This flag is useful to minimise the transactions if you know that none
of the files are on the destination.

This is a specialized flag which should be ignored by most users!

--no-gzip-encoding

Don't set Accept-Encoding: gzip. This means that rclone won't ask
the server for compressed files automatically. Useful if you've set
the server to return files with Content-Encoding: gzip but you
uploaded compressed files.

There is no need to set this in normal operation, and doing so will
decrease the network transfer efficiency of rclone.

--no-traverse

The --no-traverse flag controls whether the destination file system
is traversed when using the copy or move commands.
--no-traverse is not compatible with sync and will be ignored if
you supply it with sync.

If you are only copying a small number of files (or are filtering most
of the files) and/or have a large number of files on the destination
then --no-traverse will stop rclone listing the destination and save
time.

However, if you are copying a large number of files, especially if you
are doing a copy where lots of the files under consideration haven't
changed and won't need copying then you shouldn't use --no-traverse.

See rclone copy for an example of how to use it.

--no-unicode-normalization

Don't normalize unicode characters in filenames during the sync routine.

Sometimes, an operating system will store filenames containing unicode
parts in their decomposed form (particularly macOS). Some cloud storage
systems will then recompose the unicode, resulting in duplicate files if
the data is ever copied back to a local filesystem.

Using this flag will disable that functionality, treating each unicode
character as unique. For example, by default é and é will be normalized
into the same character. With --no-unicode-normalization they will be
treated as unique characters.

--no-update-modtime

When using this flag, rclone won't update modification times of remote
files if they are incorrect as it would normally.

This can be used if the remote is being synced with another tool also
(eg the Google Drive client).

--order-by string

The --order-by flag controls the order in which files in the backlog
are processed in rclone sync, rclone copy and rclone move.

The order by string is constructed like this. The first part
describes what aspect is being measured:

  • size - order by the size of the files
  • name - order by the full path of the files
  • modtime - order by the modification date of the files

This can have a modifier appended with a comma:

  • ascending or asc - order so that the smallest (or oldest) is processed first
  • descending or desc - order so that the largest (or newest) is processed first
  • mixed - order so that the smallest is processed first for some threads and the largest for others

If the modifier is mixed then it can have an optional percentage
(which defaults to 50), eg size,mixed,25 which means that 25% of
the threads should be taking the smallest items and 75% the
largest. The threads which take the smallest first will always take
the smallest first and likewise the largest first threads. The mixed
mode can be useful to minimise the transfer time when you are
transferring a mixture of large and small files - the large files are
guaranteed upload threads and bandwidth and the small files will be
processed continuously.

If no modifier is supplied then the order is ascending.

For example

  • --order-by size,desc - send the largest files first
  • --order-by modtime,ascending - send the oldest files first
  • --order-by name - send the files with alphabetically by path first

If the --order-by flag is not supplied or it is supplied with an
empty string then the default ordering will be used which is as
scanned. With --checkers 1 this is mostly alphabetical, however
with the default --checkers 8 it is somewhat random.

Limitations

The --order-by flag does not do a separate pass over the data. This
means that it may transfer some files out of the order specified if

  • there are no files in the backlog or the source has not been fully scanned yet
  • there are more than --max-backlog files in the backlog

Rclone will do its best to transfer the best file it has so in
practice this should not cause a problem. Think of --order-by as
being more of a best efforts flag rather than a perfect ordering.

--password-command SpaceSepList

This flag supplies a program which should supply the config password
when run. This is an alternative to rclone prompting for the password
or setting the RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS variable.

The argument to this should be a command with a space separated list
of arguments. If one of the arguments has a space in then enclose it
in ", if you want a literal " in an argument then enclose the
argument in " and double the ". See CSV encoding
for more info.

Eg

--password-command echo hello
--password-command echo "hello with space"
--password-command echo "hello with ""quotes"" and space"

See the Configuration Encryption for more info.

See a Windows Powershell example on the Wiki.

-P, --progress

This flag makes rclone update the stats in a static block in the
terminal providing a realtime overview of the transfer.

Any log messages will scroll above the static block. Log messages
will push the static block down to the bottom of the terminal where it
will stay.

Normally this is updated every 500mS but this period can be overridden
with the --stats flag.

This can be used with the --stats-one-line flag for a simpler
display.

Note: On Windows until this bug
is fixed all non-ASCII characters will be replaced with . when
--progress is in use.

-q, --quiet

This flag will limit rclone's output to error messages only.

--retries int

Retry the entire sync if it fails this many times it fails (default 3).

Some remotes can be unreliable and a few retries help pick up the
files which didn't get transferred because of errors.

Disable retries with --retries 1.

--retries-sleep=TIME

This sets the interval between each retry specified by --retries

The default is 0. Use 0 to disable.

--size-only

Normally rclone will look at modification time and size of files to
see if they are equal. If you set this flag then rclone will check
only the size.

This can be useful transferring files from Dropbox which have been
modified by the desktop sync client which doesn't set checksums of
modification times in the same way as rclone.

--stats=TIME

Commands which transfer data (sync, copy, copyto, move,
moveto) will print data transfer stats at regular intervals to show
their progress.

This sets the interval.

The default is 1m. Use 0 to disable.

If you set the stats interval then all commands can show stats. This
can be useful when running other commands, check or mount for
example.

Stats are logged at INFO level by default which means they won't
show at default log level NOTICE. Use --stats-log-level NOTICE or
-v to make them show. See the Logging section for more
info on log levels.

Note that on macOS you can send a SIGINFO (which is normally ctrl-T in
the terminal) to make the stats print immediately.

--stats-file-name-length integer

By default, the --stats output will truncate file names and paths longer
than 40 characters. This is equivalent to providing
--stats-file-name-length 40. Use --stats-file-name-length 0 to disable
any truncation of file names printed by stats.

--stats-log-level string

Log level to show --stats output at. This can be DEBUG, INFO,
NOTICE, or ERROR. The default is INFO. This means at the
default level of logging which is NOTICE the stats won't show - if
you want them to then use --stats-log-level NOTICE. See the Logging
section for more info on log levels.

--stats-one-line

When this is specified, rclone condenses the stats into a single line
showing the most important stats only.

--stats-one-line-date

When this is specified, rclone enables the single-line stats and prepends
the display with a date string. The default is 2006/01/02 15:04:05 -

--stats-one-line-date-format

When this is specified, rclone enables the single-line stats and prepends
the display with a user-supplied date string. The date string MUST be
enclosed in quotes. Follow golang specs for
date formatting syntax.

--stats-unit=bits|bytes

By default, data transfer rates will be printed in bytes/second.

This option allows the data rate to be printed in bits/second.

Data transfer volume will still be reported in bytes.

The rate is reported as a binary unit, not SI unit. So 1 Mbit/s
equals 1,048,576 bits/s and not 1,000,000 bits/s.

The default is bytes.

--suffix=SUFFIX

When using sync, copy or move any files which would have been
overwritten or deleted will have the suffix added to them. If there
is a file with the same path (after the suffix has been added), then
it will be overwritten.

The remote in use must support server side move or copy and you must
use the same remote as the destination of the sync.

This is for use with files to add the suffix in the current directory
or with --backup-dir. See --backup-dir for more info.

For example

rclone sync /path/to/local/file remote:current --suffix .bak

will sync /path/to/local to remote:current, but for any files
which would have been updated or deleted have .bak added.

--suffix-keep-extension

When using --suffix, setting this causes rclone put the SUFFIX
before the extension of the files that it backs up rather than after.

So let's say we had --suffix -2019-01-01, without the flag file.txt
would be backed up to file.txt-2019-01-01 and with the flag it would
be backed up to file-2019-01-01.txt. This can be helpful to make
sure the suffixed files can still be opened.

--syslog

On capable OSes (not Windows or Plan9) send all log output to syslog.

This can be useful for running rclone in a script or rclone mount.

--syslog-facility string

If using --syslog this sets the syslog facility (eg KERN, USER).
See man syslog for a list of possible facilities. The default
facility is DAEMON.

--tpslimit float

Limit HTTP transactions per second to this. Default is 0 which is used
to mean unlimited transactions per second.

For example to limit rclone to 10 HTTP transactions per second use
--tpslimit 10, or to 1 transaction every 2 seconds use --tpslimit 0.5.

Use this when the number of transactions per second from rclone is
causing a problem with the cloud storage provider (eg getting you
banned or rate limited).

This can be very useful for rclone mount to control the behaviour of
applications using it.

See also --tpslimit-burst.

--tpslimit-burst int

Max burst of transactions for --tpslimit. (default 1)

Normally --tpslimit will do exactly the number of transaction per
second specified. However if you supply --tps-burst then rclone can
save up some transactions from when it was idle giving a burst of up
to the parameter supplied.

For example if you provide --tpslimit-burst 10 then if rclone has
been idle for more than 10*--tpslimit then it can do 10 transactions
very quickly before they are limited again.

This may be used to increase performance of --tpslimit without
changing the long term average number of transactions per second.

--track-renames

By default, rclone doesn't keep track of renamed files, so if you
rename a file locally then sync it to a remote, rclone will delete the
old file on the remote and upload a new copy.

If you use this flag, and the remote supports server side copy or
server side move, and the source and destination have a compatible
hash, then this will track renames during sync
operations and perform renaming server-side.

Files will be matched by size and hash - if both match then a rename
will be considered.

If the destination does not support server-side copy or move, rclone
will fall back to the default behaviour and log an error level message
to the console. Note: Encrypted destinations are not supported
by --track-renames.

Note that --track-renames is incompatible with --no-traverse and
that it uses extra memory to keep track of all the rename candidates.

Note also that --track-renames is incompatible with
--delete-before and will select --delete-after instead of
--delete-during.

--track-renames-strategy (hash,modtime)

This option changes the matching criteria for --track-renames to match
by any combination of modtime, hash, size. Matching by size is always enabled
no matter what option is selected here. This also means
that it enables --track-renames support for encrypted destinations.
If nothing is specified, the default option is matching by hashes.

--delete-(before,during,after)

This option allows you to specify when files on your destination are
deleted when you sync folders.

Specifying the value --delete-before will delete all files present
on the destination, but not on the source before starting the
transfer of any new or updated files. This uses two passes through the
file systems, one for the deletions and one for the copies.

Specifying --delete-during will delete files while checking and
uploading files. This is the fastest option and uses the least memory.

Specifying --delete-after (the default value) will delay deletion of
files until all new/updated files have been successfully transferred.
The files to be deleted are collected in the copy pass then deleted
after the copy pass has completed successfully. The files to be
deleted are held in memory so this mode may use more memory. This is
the safest mode as it will only delete files if there have been no
errors subsequent to that. If there have been errors before the
deletions start then you will get the message not deleting files as there were IO errors.

--fast-list

When doing anything which involves a directory listing (eg sync,
copy, ls - in fact nearly every command), rclone normally lists a
directory and processes it before using more directory lists to
process any subdirectories. This can be parallelised and works very
quickly using the least amount of memory.

However, some remotes have a way of listing all files beneath a
directory in one (or a small number) of transactions. These tend to
be the bucket based remotes (eg S3, B2, GCS, Swift, Hubic).

If you use the --fast-list flag then rclone will use this method for
listing directories. This will have the following consequences for
the listing:

  • It will use fewer transactions (important if you pay for them)
  • It will use more memory. Rclone has to load the whole listing into memory.
  • It may be faster because it uses fewer transactions
  • It may be slower because it can't be parallelized

rclone should always give identical results with and without
--fast-list.

If you pay for transactions and can fit your entire sync listing into
memory then --fast-list is recommended. If you have a very big sync
to do then don't use --fast-list otherwise you will run out of
memory.

If you use --fast-list on a remote which doesn't support it, then
rclone will just ignore it.

--timeout=TIME

This sets the IO idle timeout. If a transfer has started but then
becomes idle for this long it is considered broken and disconnected.

The default is 5m. Set to 0 to disable.

--transfers=N

The number of file transfers to run in parallel. It can sometimes be
useful to set this to a smaller number if the remote is giving a lot
of timeouts or bigger if you have lots of bandwidth and a fast remote.

The default is to run 4 file transfers in parallel.

-u, --update

This forces rclone to skip any files which exist on the destination
and have a modified time that is newer than the source file.

This can be useful when transferring to a remote which doesn't support
mod times directly (or when using --use-server-modtime to avoid extra
API calls) as it is more accurate than a --size-only check and faster
than using --checksum.

If an existing destination file has a modification time equal (within
the computed modify window precision) to the source file's, it will be
updated if the sizes are different. If --checksum is set then
rclone will update the destination if the checksums differ too.

If an existing destination file is older than the source file then
it will be updated if the size or checksum differs from the source file.

On remotes which don't support mod time directly (or when using
--use-server-modtime) the time checked will be the uploaded time.
This means that if uploading to one of these remotes, rclone will skip
any files which exist on the destination and have an uploaded time that
is newer than the modification time of the source file.

--use-mmap

If this flag is set then rclone will use anonymous memory allocated by
mmap on Unix based platforms and VirtualAlloc on Windows for its
transfer buffers (size controlled by --buffer-size). Memory
allocated like this does not go on the Go heap and can be returned to
the OS immediately when it is finished with.

If this flag is not set then rclone will allocate and free the buffers
using the Go memory allocator which may use more memory as memory
pages are returned less aggressively to the OS.

It is possible this does not work well on all platforms so it is
disabled by default; in the future it may be enabled by default.

--use-server-modtime

Some object-store backends (e.g, Swift, S3) do not preserve file modification
times (modtime). On these backends, rclone stores the original modtime as
additional metadata on the object. By default it will make an API call to
retrieve the metadata when the modtime is needed by an operation.

Use this flag to disable the extra API call and rely instead on the server's
modified time. In cases such as a local to remote sync using --update,
knowing the local file is newer than the time it was last uploaded to the
remote is sufficient. In those cases, this flag can speed up the process and
reduce the number of API calls necessary.

Using this flag on a sync operation without also using --update would cause
all files modified at any time other than the last upload time to be uploaded
again, which is probably not what you want.

-v, -vv, --verbose

With -v rclone will tell you about each file that is transferred and
a small number of significant events.

With -vv rclone will become very verbose telling you about every
file it considers and transfers. Please send bug reports with a log
with this setting.

-V, --version

Prints the version number

SSL/TLS options

The outgoing SSL/TLS connections rclone makes can be controlled with
these options. For example this can be very useful with the HTTP or
WebDAV backends. Rclone HTTP servers have their own set of
configuration for SSL/TLS which you can find in their documentation.

--ca-cert string

This loads the PEM encoded certificate authority certificate and uses
it to verify the certificates of the servers rclone connects to.

If you have generated certificates signed with a local CA then you
will need this flag to connect to servers using those certificates.

--client-cert string

This loads the PEM encoded client side certificate.

This is used for mutual TLS authentication.

The --client-key flag is required too when using this.

--client-key string

This loads the PEM encoded client side private key used for mutual TLS
authentication. Used in conjunction with --client-cert.

--no-check-certificate=true/false

--no-check-certificate controls whether a client verifies the
server's certificate chain and host name.
If --no-check-certificate is true, TLS accepts any certificate
presented by the server and any host name in that certificate.
In this mode, TLS is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks.

This option defaults to false.

This should be used only for testing.

Configuration Encryption

Your configuration file contains information for logging in to
your cloud services. This means that you should keep your
.rclone.conf file in a secure location.

If you are in an environment where that isn't possible, you can
add a password to your configuration. This means that you will
have to supply the password every time you start rclone.

To add a password to your rclone configuration, execute rclone config.

>rclone config
Current remotes:

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/s/q>

Go into s, Set configuration password:

e/n/d/s/q> s
Your configuration is not encrypted.
If you add a password, you will protect your login information to cloud services.
a) Add Password
q) Quit to main menu
a/q> a
Enter NEW configuration password:
password:
Confirm NEW password:
password:
Password set
Your configuration is encrypted.
c) Change Password
u) Unencrypt configuration
q) Quit to main menu
c/u/q>

Your configuration is now encrypted, and every time you start rclone
you will have to supply the password. See below for details.
In the same menu, you can change the password or completely remove
encryption from your configuration.

There is no way to recover the configuration if you lose your password.

rclone uses nacl secretbox
which in turn uses XSalsa20 and Poly1305 to encrypt and authenticate
your configuration with secret-key cryptography.
The password is SHA-256 hashed, which produces the key for secretbox.
The hashed password is not stored.

While this provides very good security, we do not recommend storing
your encrypted rclone configuration in public if it contains sensitive
information, maybe except if you use a very strong password.

If it is safe in your environment, you can set the RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS
environment variable to contain your password, in which case it will be
used for decrypting the configuration.

You can set this for a session from a script. For unix like systems
save this to a file called set-rclone-password:

#!/bin/echo Source this file don't run it

read -s RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS
export RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS

Then source the file when you want to use it. From the shell you
would do source set-rclone-password. It will then ask you for the
password and set it in the environment variable.

An alternate means of supplying the password is to provide a script
which will retrieve the password and print on standard output. This
script should have a fully specified path name and not rely on any
environment variables. The script is supplied either via
--password-command="..." command line argument or via the
RCLONE_PASSWORD_COMMAND environment variable.

One useful example of this is using the passwordstore application
to retrieve the password:

export RCLONE_PASSWORD_COMMAND="pass rclone/config"

If the passwordstore password manager holds the password for the
rclone configuration, using the script method means the password
is primarily protected by the passwordstore system, and is never
embedded in the clear in scripts, nor available for examination
using the standard commands available. It is quite possible with
long running rclone sessions for copies of passwords to be innocently
captured in log files or terminal scroll buffers, etc. Using the
script method of supplying the password enhances the security of
the config password considerably.

If you are running rclone inside a script, unless you are using the
--password-command method, you might want to disable
password prompts. To do that, pass the parameter
--ask-password=false to rclone. This will make rclone fail instead
of asking for a password if RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS doesn't contain
a valid password, and --password-command has not been supplied.

Developer options

These options are useful when developing or debugging rclone. There
are also some more remote specific options which aren't documented
here which are used for testing. These start with remote name eg
--drive-test-option - see the docs for the remote in question.

--cpuprofile=FILE

Write CPU profile to file. This can be analysed with go tool pprof.

--dump flag,flag,flag

The --dump flag takes a comma separated list of flags to dump info
about.

Note that some headers including Accept-Encoding as shown may not
be correct in the request and the response may not show Content-Encoding
if the go standard libraries auto gzip encoding was in effect. In this case
the body of the request will be gunzipped before showing it.

The available flags are:

--dump headers

Dump HTTP headers with Authorization: lines removed. May still
contain sensitive info. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging
only.

Use --dump auth if you do want the Authorization: headers.

--dump bodies

Dump HTTP headers and bodies - may contain sensitive info. Can be
very verbose. Useful for debugging only.

Note that the bodies are buffered in memory so don't use this for
enormous files.

--dump requests

Like --dump bodies but dumps the request bodies and the response
headers. Useful for debugging download problems.

--dump responses

Like --dump bodies but dumps the response bodies and the request
headers. Useful for debugging upload problems.

--dump auth

Dump HTTP headers - will contain sensitive info such as
Authorization: headers - use --dump headers to dump without
Authorization: headers. Can be very verbose. Useful for debugging
only.

--dump filters

Dump the filters to the output. Useful to see exactly what include
and exclude options are filtering on.

--dump goroutines

This dumps a list of the running go-routines at the end of the command
to standard output.

--dump openfiles

This dumps a list of the open files at the end of the command. It
uses the lsof command to do that so you'll need that installed to
use it.

--memprofile=FILE

Write memory profile to file. This can be analysed with go tool pprof.

Filtering

For the filtering options

  • --delete-excluded
  • --filter
  • --filter-from
  • --exclude
  • --exclude-from
  • --include
  • --include-from
  • --files-from
  • --files-from-raw
  • --min-size
  • --max-size
  • --min-age
  • --max-age
  • --dump filters

See the filtering section.

Remote control

For the remote control options and for instructions on how to remote control rclone

  • --rc
  • and anything starting with --rc-

See the remote control section.

Logging

rclone has 4 levels of logging, ERROR, NOTICE, INFO and DEBUG.

By default, rclone logs to standard error. This means you can redirect
standard error and still see the normal output of rclone commands (eg
rclone ls).

By default, rclone will produce Error and Notice level messages.

If you use the -q flag, rclone will only produce Error messages.

If you use the -v flag, rclone will produce Error, Notice and
Info messages.

If you use the -vv flag, rclone will produce Error, Notice,
Info and Debug messages.

You can also control the log levels with the --log-level flag.

If you use the --log-file=FILE option, rclone will redirect Error,
Info and Debug messages along with standard error to FILE.

If you use the --syslog flag then rclone will log to syslog and the
--syslog-facility control which facility it uses.

Rclone prefixes all log messages with their level in capitals, eg INFO
which makes it easy to grep the log file for different kinds of
information.

Exit Code

If any errors occur during the command execution, rclone will exit with a
non-zero exit code. This allows scripts to detect when rclone
operations have failed.

During the startup phase, rclone will exit immediately if an error is
detected in the configuration. There will always be a log message
immediately before exiting.

When rclone is running it will accumulate errors as it goes along, and
only exit with a non-zero exit code if (after retries) there were
still failed transfers. For every error counted there will be a high
priority log message (visible with -q) showing the message and
which file caused the problem. A high priority message is also shown
when starting a retry so the user can see that any previous error
messages may not be valid after the retry. If rclone has done a retry
it will log a high priority message if the retry was successful.

List of exit codes

  • 0 - success
  • 1 - Syntax or usage error
  • 2 - Error not otherwise categorised
  • 3 - Directory not found
  • 4 - File not found
  • 5 - Temporary error (one that more retries might fix) (Retry errors)
  • 6 - Less serious errors (like 461 errors from dropbox) (NoRetry errors)
  • 7 - Fatal error (one that more retries won't fix, like account suspended) (Fatal errors)
  • 8 - Transfer exceeded - limit set by --max-transfer reached
  • 9 - Operation successful, but no files transferred

Environment Variables

Rclone can be configured entirely using environment variables. These
can be used to set defaults for options or config file entries.

Options

Every option in rclone can have its default set by environment
variable.

To find the name of the environment variable, first, take the long
option name, strip the leading --, change - to _, make
upper case and prepend RCLONE_.

For example, to always set --stats 5s, set the environment variable
RCLONE_STATS=5s. If you set stats on the command line this will
override the environment variable setting.

Or to always use the trash in drive --drive-use-trash, set
RCLONE_DRIVE_USE_TRASH=true.

The same parser is used for the options and the environment variables
so they take exactly the same form.

Config file

You can set defaults for values in the config file on an individual
remote basis. If you want to use this feature, you will need to
discover the name of the config items that you want. The easiest way
is to run through rclone config by hand, then look in the config
file to see what the values are (the config file can be found by
looking at the help for --config in rclone help).

To find the name of the environment variable, you need to set, take
RCLONE_CONFIG_ + name of remote + _ + name of config file option
and make it all uppercase.

For example, to configure an S3 remote named mys3: without a config
file (using unix ways of setting environment variables):

$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_TYPE=s3
$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXX
$ export RCLONE_CONFIG_MYS3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXX
$ rclone lsd MYS3:
          -1 2016-09-21 12:54:21        -1 my-bucket
$ rclone listremotes | grep mys3
mys3:

Note that if you want to create a remote using environment variables
you must create the ..._TYPE variable as above.

Other environment variables

  • RCLONE_CONFIG_PASS` set to contain your config file password (see Configuration Encryption section)
  • HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY (or the lowercase versions thereof).
    • HTTPS_PROXY takes precedence over HTTP_PROXY for https requests.
    • The environment values may be either a complete URL or a "host[:port]" for, in which case the "http" scheme is assumed.