rclone for Google Drive and Dropbox

November 7, 2022

rclone seamlessly connects to remote cloud storage for cloud storage services including Google Shared Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive and many more providers. The rclone CLI is easier than rsync. rclone works with encrypted filesystems.

Setup Rclone:

Linux: winget install Rclone.Rclone
macOS / Homebrew: brew install rclone
Windows: winget install Rclone.Rclone

Add various remote file shares (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) by:

rclone config

In these examples, remote is the particular drive name chosen during rclone config.

Tell the location of the Rclone config file by:

rclone config file

Rclone command examples

List remote directories:

rclone lsd remote:

List remote directories under path/to

rclone lsd remote:path/to

List remote files under path/to

rclone ls remote:path/to

Count number of files in path/to

rclone ls remote:path/to | wc -l

copy in rclone by default does not clobber existing remote files, if they haven’t been changed.

Recursively copy local computer ~/path to remote

rclone copy ~/path remote:path -v

Copy only this directory contents ~/path to remote

rclone copy --max-depth 0  ~/path remote:path -v

Using rclone sync requires caution, because sync DELETES files on remote that are not also on local PC!

Sync local computer ~/path to the remote

rclone sync ~/path remote:path -v

Dropbox

Why not use Dropbox’s unofficial dbxcli? At the time of writing, the last release was in 2019 with many unsolved issues.