Cloud Storage Sync Program Rclone 1.51 Adds SugarSync And Memory Backends, Async Mount Reads
The latest Rclone 1.51.0 release adds new memory and SugarSync backends, async mount reads which results in a 20% speedup, and much more.
Rclone is a free and open source command line program for synchronizing files and folders to and from cloud storage services like Amazon Drive and S3, Google Drive / Photos and Cloud Storage, Dropbox, Nextcloud, Microsoft OneDrive, DigitalOcean Spaces, pCloud, Mega, Yandex Disk, and many others (with WebDAV and SFTP also supported). It's available for Linux, macOS, *BSD, Solaris and Windows.
The tool features encryption, cache and union (similar to UnionFS) backends, a built-in experimental Web based GUI (added in version 1.49), multi-threaded downloads to local disk, it preserves timestamps on files, and it has partial sync support on a whole file basis. There are some third-party GUI programs that make managing Rclone easier, including Rclone Browser (updated fork) which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Rclone also provides optional FUSE mount support, which means you can use it to mount any of the supported remotes (cloud storage systems) as a filesystem. See how easy it is to mount OneDrive in Linux using Rclone here (with support for both Business and Personal accounts).
The latest Rclone version 1.51.0 adds 2 new backends: SugarSync and memory.
The SugarSync backend enables Rclone to interact with SugarSync, a cloud service that enables active synchronization of files across computers and other devices for file backup, access, syncing, and sharing from a variety of operating systems like Android, iOS, macOS and Windows. There is no official SugarSync Linux client, so Rclone adding support for this service enables those that use this service to easily access their files on Linux.
The new SugarSync Rclone remote will ask you for your email and password when setting it up, but Rclone doesn't store them, they are only needed to get the initial token.
The memory backend is called that because it's a RAM backend. It behaves like a bucket-based remote (for example s3), and it has no parameters so you can use it with the
:memory: remote name.Since this is a RAM backend, data is not persistent, so it's useful "for testing or with an rclone server or rclone mount". For example:
rclone mount :memory: /mnt/tmp
rclone serve webdav :memory:
rclone serve sftp :memory:In this new Rclone version, asynchronous reads have been enabled for mounts and the result is a 20% speedup. The commit message points out that "now that the vfs can cope with 'out of order' reads we can enable the async read feature for an increase in throughput on the local disk of about 20%."
Speaking of this, in case you use Google Drive OCamlFUSE instead of Rclone to mount Google Drive on Linux, here's an article on how to speed it up.
There are many other changes in Rclone 1.51.0, but to name just a few more:
- Adjust all backends to have
--backend-encodingparameter - this enables the encoding for special characters to be adjusted or disabled - Add
--max-durationflag to control the maximum duration of a transfer session - Add
--password-commandto allow dynamic config password rcd(this runs Rclone so that it only listens to remote control commands): move webgui apart and add option to disable browser- VFS:
- Only calculate one hash for reads for a speedup
- Make ReadAt for non cached files work better with non-sequential reads
- Various file renaming fixes when using the cache
- Jottacloud: Use new auth method used by the official client
- SFTP: Add
--sftp-skip-linksto skip symlinks and non-regular files - Complete changelog
Download Rclone
The download page includes binaries for Linux (including generic binaries, DEB for Debian / Ubuntu and others from the Debian family, and RPM for RedHat / Fedora / openSUSE), macOS and *BSD, as well as a generic script to automatically download Rclone and set everything up. You'll also want to read the Rclone documentation.
