Basics of rclone

Stairway to the Cloud

Article from Issue 187/2016
Author(s):

As a simple and reliable command-line backup utility that supports popular cloud storage services, rclone makes a perfect tool for maintaining an off-site backup of your data. This article can help you to get started.

Cloud storage is cheap nowadays, and you have plenty of storage providers to choose from. So, you have no excuse for not having an off-site backup system to keep your files safe. There is a fly in the ointment, however. Many cloud storage services want you to use their own proprietary graphical client applications. Worse still, some services don't provide Linux clients at all. Fortunately, there is rclone, a small open source utility that can talk to many popular cloud storage services, including Google Drive, Amazon S3, and hubiC. Additionally, rclone can handle local filesystems, so you can use it for local backup, too. The utility is straightforward in use, so there is no learning curve to speak of.

Deploying rclone

Written in Go, rclone is distributed as a self-contained binary file with no dependencies, and it will happily run on the x86, AMD64, and ARM platforms. Installing rclone is not difficult, but it does require a bit of manual work. Grab the latest release of the tool for the appropriate Linux platform from the project's website [1]. Unpack the downloaded archive and switch to the resulting directory in the terminal. Then, copy the binary executable to the /usr/local/bin/ directory and change the file's permissions:

sudo cp rclone /usr/local/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/rclone

[...]

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