Rclone – command line program to sync files and directories

Rclone is an open source command line program to sync files and directories to and from Google Drive, Amazon S3, Openstack Swift / Rackspace cloud files / Memset Memstore, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Hubic, Backblaze B2, Yandex Disk, and the local filesystem. Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems.

Rclone syncs a directory tree from one storage system to another. Rclone stores each file you transfer as a native object on the remote cloud storage system. This means that you can see the files you upload as expected using alternative access methods (eg using the Google Drive web interface). There is a 1:1 mapping between files on your hard disk and objects created in the cloud storage system.

Rclone is a Go program and comes as a single binary file.

Google Drive has quite a lot of rate limiting. This causes Rclone to be limited to transferring about 2 files per second only. Individual files may be transferred much faster at 100s of MBytes/s but lots of small files can take a long time.

Features include:

  • MD5/SHA1 hashes checked at all times for file integrity.
  • Timestamps preserved on files.
  • Partial syncs supported on a whole file basis.
  • Copy mode to just copy new/changed files.
  • Sync (one way) mode to make a directory identical.
  • Check mode to check for file hash equality.
  • Can sync to and from network, eg two different cloud accounts.
  • Works with an HTTP proxy.

Website: rclone.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Nick Craig-Wood and contributors
License: MIT License

Rclone is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

Return to Google Drive Clients


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