Textbook of Linux

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rclone

rsync for cloud storage.

rclone synchronises files between dozens of cloud-storage backends — Amazon S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Backblaze B2, pCloud, S3-compatible MinIO clusters, WebDAV, SFTP, and many more — and local disks. It can also expose remote storage as a FUSE-mounted filesystem, encrypt data on the way to cloud storage, and act as a server for HTTP, WebDAV, FTP, or S3- compatible APIs.

Nick Craig-Wood started rclone in 2014 and has continued to lead its development, with a substantial volunteer community now contributing back-ends and features. The implementation is in Go, so distribution is a single static binary, and the tool is packaged in every major Linux distribution.

rclone is widely used for backups, cross-cloud migrations, syncing media collections to home servers, and replicating private object-storage buckets between providers. Its support for client-side encryption and crypt-and-resize chains has made it particularly popular for self-hosted setups where users want encrypted-at-rest backups in commodity cloud storage.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install rclone
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install rclone
Arch:          sudo pacman -S rclone
macOS:         brew install rclone