rclone — The Swiss Army Knife of Cloud Storage

When to Use

Use this skill when you need rclone command-line cloud storage manager reference and usage guide. Use this skill whenever the user mentions rclone, or any task involving terminal-based cloud file operations such as upload, download, sync, copy, move, mount, or remote management. Triggers on S3-compatible storage,...

Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors' web storage interfaces. Over 70 cloud storage products support rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, and standard transfer protocols.

Rclone has powerful cloud equivalents to the unix commands rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, rm, and cat. It preserves timestamps and verifies checksums at all times. Transfers can be restarted from the last good file.

Official resources: rclone.org | Docs | Commands | Install | Forum | GitHub

Prerequisites

Before using rclone, verify it is installed:

# Check if rclone is installed
rclone --version

# If not found, run the install script:
# See scripts/install.sh in this skill's directory
sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

# Or for beta version:
sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash -s beta

For offline/manual installation, use the bundled script at scripts/install.sh.

Security Warnings

IMPORTANT: Rclone is extremely powerful and can irreversibly modify or delete data on cloud storage. Pay close attention to the following safety guidelines:

• Always use --dry-run first when running sync, move, delete, or purge commands. This shows what would happen without actually doing it.
• Use --interactive / -i flag while learning rclone to avoid accidental data loss. It asks for confirmation before each destructive operation.
• Never expose credentials in plain text on the command line. Use rclone config to store credentials securely, or use environment variables.
• Private keys and tokens (S3 secret keys, service account JSON, OAuth tokens) must never be committed to version control or logged. The config file ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf contains sensitive data — protect it with chmod 600.
• rclone purge ignores all filters — it deletes everything under the specified path. Use with extreme caution.
• rclone sync makes dest identical to source — files in dest that are not in source will be DELETED. Always verify with --dry-run first.
• Remote control API (--rc) should bind to localhost only by default. Exposing it without authentication (--rc-htpasswd) allows anyone to control your rclone instance.
• Mount operations can cause data loss if the mount is interrupted during writes. Use --vfs-cache-mode full for safer writes.

Quick Reference

Configuration

# Interactive configuration (recommended)
rclone config

# Show current config (redacts secrets by default)
rclone config show

# Show full config including secrets (DANGEROUS — do not share output)
rclone config show --redacted=false

# List configured remotes
rclone listremotes

# Create a remote non-interactively
rclone config create myremote s3 provider=AWS env_auth=true region=us-east-1

# Update existing remote
rclone config update myremote region=us-west-2

Basic Syntax

rclone subcommand [options] source:path dest:path

Source and destination paths use remote:path syntax. For local paths, just use /path/to/dir.

Core Commands

# List files
rclone ls remote:path                    # list all objects with size
rclone lsd remote:path                   # list directories
rclone lsl remote:path                   # list with size, modtime, path
rclone lsf remote:path                   # list in flexible format
rclone size remote:path                  # total size and object count
rclone tree remote:path                  # tree view

# Copy (does not delete files at destination)
rclone copy /local/path remote:path      # local to remote
rclone copy remote:path /local/path      # remote to local
rclone copy remote1:path remote2:path    # remote to remote (server-side if possible)


…