Each cloud storage system is slightly different. Rclone attempts toprovide a unified interface to them, but some underlying differencesshow through.

• B2 Cloud Storage
• Rclone Backblaze Slow
• Backblaze Backup
• Rclone Backblaze B2
• B2 Backblaze
• Backblaze Rclone Mount
• B2 Cloud

Features

Here is an overview of the major features of each cloud storage system.

• Backblaze B2 is enterprise-grade, S3 compatible storage that companies around the world use to store and serve data while improving their cloud OpEx vs. Amazon S3 and others. Developers use it to easily build apps and manage services. IT leaders use it to backup.
• In Rclone, run 'rclone listremotes' to check that the Azure Blob or Backblaze B2 containers are in the remotes list. Check that you can access objects inside your Azure Blob or Backblaze B2 containers by using the Rclone commands in the verification.txt file available in the “Attachments' section.

Notes

¹ Dropbox supports its own customhash.This is an SHA256 sum of all the 4MB block SHA256s.

2) BackBlaze B2. It's again secure, afforadble and more fast. It doesnt have an application for Linux so I am looking at using Rclone. Has anyone tried using rclone and readynas and especially rclone with Backblaze B2. Are there any challenges, pitfals or is it straightforward? Any additional info/reviews on.

² SFTP supports checksums if the same login has shell access andmd5sum or sha1sum as well as echo are in the remote's PATH.

³ WebDAV supports hashes when used with Owncloud and Nextcloud only.

⁴ WebDAV supports modtimes when used with Owncloud and Nextcloud only.

⁵ Microsoft OneDrive Personal supports SHA1 hashes, whereas OneDrivefor business and SharePoint server support Microsoft's ownQuickXorHash.

⁶ Mail.ru uses its own modified SHA1 hash

⁷ pCloud only supports SHA1 (not MD5) in its EU region

⁸ Opendrive does not support creation of duplicate files usingtheir web client interface or other stock clients, but the underlyingstorage platform has been determined to allow duplicate files, and itis possible to create them with rclone. It may be that this is amistake or an unsupported feature.

Hash

The cloud storage system supports various hash types of the objects.The hashes are used when transferring data as an integrity check andcan be specifically used with the --checksum flag in syncs and inthe check command.

To use the verify checksums when transferring between cloud storagesystems they must support a common hash type.

ModTime

The cloud storage system supports setting modification times onobjects. If it does then this enables a using the modification timesas part of the sync. If not then only the size will be checked bydefault, though the MD5SUM can be checked with the --checksum flag.

All cloud storage systems support some kind of date on the object andthese will be set when transferring from the cloud storage system.

Case Insensitive

If a cloud storage systems is case sensitive then it is possible tohave two files which differ only in case, e.g. file.txt andFILE.txt. If a cloud storage system is case insensitive then thatisn't possible.

This can cause problems when syncing between a case insensitivesystem and a case sensitive system. The symptom of this is that nomatter how many times you run the sync it never completes fully.

The local filesystem and SFTP may or may not be case sensitivedepending on OS.

• Windows - usually case insensitive, though case is preserved
• OSX - usually case insensitive, though it is possible to format case sensitive
• Linux - usually case sensitive, but there are case insensitive file systems (e.g. FAT formatted USB keys)

Most of the time this doesn't cause any problems as people tend toavoid files whose name differs only by case even on case sensitivesystems.

Duplicate files

If a cloud storage system allows duplicate files then it can have twoobjects with the same name.

This confuses rclone greatly when syncing - use the rclone dedupecommand to rename or remove duplicates.

Restricted filenames

Some cloud storage systems might have restrictions on the charactersthat are usable in file or directory names.When rclone detects such a name during a file upload, it willtransparently replace the restricted characters with similar lookingUnicode characters.

This process is designed to avoid ambiguous file names as much aspossible and allow to move files between many cloud storage systemstransparently.

The name shown by rclone to the user or during log output will onlycontain a minimal set of replaced charactersto ensure correct formatting and not necessarily the actual name usedon the cloud storage.

This transformation is reversed when downloading a file or parsingrclone arguments.For example, when uploading a file named my file?.txt to Onedrivewill be displayed as my file?.txt on the console, but stored asmy file？.txt (the ? gets replaced by the similar looking ？character) to Onedrive.The reverse transformation allows to read a fileunusual/name.txtfrom Google Drive, by passing the name unusual／name.txt (the / needsto be replaced by the similar looking ／ character) on the command line.

Default restricted characters

The table below shows the characters that are replaced by default.

When a replacement character is found in a filename, this characterwill be escaped with the ‛ character to avoid ambiguous file names.(e.g. a file named ␀.txt would shown as ‛␀.txt)

Each cloud storage backend can use a different set of characters,which will be specified in the documentation for each backend.

The default encoding will also encode these file names as they areproblematic with many cloud storage systems.

Invalid UTF-8 bytes

Some backends only support a sequence of well formed UTF-8 bytesas file or directory names.

In this case all invalid UTF-8 bytes will be replaced with a quotedrepresentation of the byte value to allow uploading a file to such abackend. For example, the invalid byte 0xFE will be encoded as ‛FE.

A common source of invalid UTF-8 bytes are local filesystems, that storenames in a different encoding than UTF-8 or UTF-16, like latin1. See thelocal filenames section for details.

Encoding option

Most backends have an encoding options, specified as a flag--backend-encoding where backend is the name of the backend, or asa config parameter encoding (you'll need to select the Advancedconfig in rclone config to see it).

This will have default value which encodes and decodes characters insuch a way as to preserve the maximum number of characters (seeabove).

However this can be incorrect in some scenarios, for example if youhave a Windows file system with characters such as ＊ and ？ thatyou want to remain as those characters on the remote rather than beingtranslated to * and ?.

The --backend-encoding flags allow you to change that. You candisable the encoding completely with --backend-encoding None or setencoding = None in the config file.

Encoding takes a comma separated list of encodings. You can see thelist of all available characters by passing an invalid value to thisflag, e.g. --local-encoding 'help' and rclone help flags encodingwill show you the defaults for the backends.

To take a specific example, the FTP backend's default encoding is

However, let's say the FTP server is running on Windows and can't haveany of the invalid Windows characters in file names. You are backingup Linux servers to this FTP server which do have those characters infile names. So you would add the Windows set which are

to the existing ones, giving:

This can be specified using the --ftp-encoding flag or using an encoding parameter in the config file.

Or let's say you have a Windows server but you want to preserve ＊and ？, you would then have this as the encoding (the Windowsencoding minus Asterisk and Question).

This can be specified using the --local-encoding flag or using anencoding parameter in the config file.

MIME Type

MIME types (also known as media types) classify types of documentsusing a simple text classification, e.g. text/html orapplication/pdf.

Some cloud storage systems support reading (R) the MIME type ofobjects and some support writing (W) the MIME type of objects.

The MIME type can be important if you are serving files directly toHTTP from the storage system.

If you are copying from a remote which supports reading (R) to aremote which supports writing (W) then rclone will preserve the MIMEtypes. Otherwise they will be guessed from the extension, or theremote itself may assign the MIME type.

Optional Features

All rclone remotes support a base command set. Other features dependupon backend specific capabilities.

Purge

This deletes a directory quicker than just deleting all the files inthe directory.

† Note Swift, Hubic, and Tardigrade implement this in order to deletedirectory markers but they don't actually have a quicker way of deletingfiles other than deleting them individually.

‡ StreamUpload is not supported with Nextcloud

Copy

Used when copying an object to and from the same remote. This knownas a server-side copy so you can copy a file without downloading itand uploading it again. It is used if you use rclone copy orrclone move if the remote doesn't support Move directly.

If the server doesn't support Copy directly then for copy operationsthe file is downloaded then re-uploaded.

Move

Used when moving/renaming an object on the same remote. This is knownas a server-side move of a file. This is used in rclone move if theserver doesn't support DirMove.

If the server isn't capable of Move then rclone simulates it withCopy then delete. If the server doesn't support Copy then rclonewill download the file and re-upload it.

DirMove

This is used to implement rclone move to move a directory ifpossible. If it isn't then it will use Move on each file (whichfalls back to Copy then download and upload - see Move section).

CleanUp

This is used for emptying the trash for a remote by rclone cleanup.

If the server can't do CleanUp then rclone cleanup will return anerror.

‡‡ Note that while Box implements this it has to delete every fileindividually so it will be slower than emptying the trash via the WebUI

ListR

The remote supports a recursive list to list all the contents beneatha directory quickly. This enables the --fast-list flag to work.See the rclone docs for more details.

StreamUpload

Some remotes allow files to be uploaded without knowing the file sizein advance. This allows certain operations to work without spooling thefile to local disk first, e.g. rclone rcat.

LinkSharing

Sets the necessary permissions on a file or folder and prints a linkthat allows others to access them, even if they don't have an accounton the particular cloud provider.

About

Rclone about prints quota information for a remote. Typical outputincludes bytes used, free, quota and in trash.

If a remote lacks about capability rclone about remote:returnsan error.

B2 Cloud Storage

Backends without about capability cannot determine free space for anrclone mount, or use policy mfs (most free space) as a member of anrclone union remote.

See rclone about command

EmptyDir

The remote supports empty directories. See Limitationsfor details. Most Object/Bucket based remotes do not support this.

Rclone brands themselves as “rsync for cloud storage”, and with its versatility and the number of providers it supports I’m inclined to believe them.

The setup I describe below is one that I use as a component of my backup process. It’s an automated, off-site, encrypted copy of my Documents folder from early in the morning before I start my day. It’s not meant to be a primary recovery source, but will be there if I need it.

The short of it is that I can sync my Documents directory to a Backblaze storage bucket with a single command line which I then pop into a script file that gets executed by cron every morning.

I chose Backblaze based on it’s reputation and price. They have a solid reputation and B2 is their business storage product. As for pricing, the comparison can be seen here.

Start by Logging into Backblaze, navigating to Buckets, and creating a new bucket. Give it a unique name and ensure it’s private. I chose to call mine “Desktop-1810-Documents”.

Now click the link to “Show Account ID and Application Key”. Under “Add Application Key” create a new key with access to only the bucket you just created. Copy the Application Key it shows you at the end, you won’t see it again and will have to create a new Application Key if you lose it or need to change it in the future.

Install Rclone

Compare your package version to the latest available from the Rclone website and then either install the package repository version or follow the instructions for the scripted install from their website.

Configure

Open a command prompt and type rclone config. We will start by creating a “backblaze” container pointing to our B2 bucket.

Select ‘n’ for a new remote and name it “backblaze”.

Use the bucket applicationKeyId as the account and the Application Key itself as the key. Do not use your actual Account ID listed at the top of the Buckets page.

Now decide if you’d like to have files permanently deleted when you delete them from your local machine. Skip the advanced config (select ‘n’) and then review and finalize your settings.

Verify it worked with rclone lsd backblaze: The output should be the name of the B2 bucket.

Now we’re going to create an encrypted remote named “encrypted_b2” inside our backblaze remote.

Run rclone config again and select ‘new remote’. This time call it “encrypted_b2” and select the Encrypt/Decrypt a remote option from the list of remotes.

It will now ask for the name of the remote to encrypt. Here type in backblaze: followed by the B2 Bucket name from above. In my case this would be backblaze:Desktop-1810-Documents

Answer the remaining questions about encrypting file names and complete the wizard.

Your remote is now configured and all of your backup destinations should point to encrypted_b2.

Rclone Backblaze Slow

We’re now ready to perform the first sync.
rclone sync -v /home/user/Documents/ encrypted_b2:/Documents/

Once completed (and after a few minutes) you can go back to the Backblaze B2 website, click on the Bucket, and you should see one high-level folder possibly with the name encrypted depending on your earlier choice.

Backblaze Backup

Congratulations, your files are now backed-up securely offsite at minimal cost!

Rclone Backblaze B2

Now paste that line into a text file, name it with a .sh extension, make it executable, and schedule it with cron.

B2 Backblaze

To restore files you would just initiate a sync in the opposite direction.
rclone sync -v encrypted_b2:/Documents/ /home/user/Desktop/restoredDocs/

Backblaze Rclone Mount

As a nice bonus Rclone also gives you the ability to mount a remote B2 bucket as a local drive with the rclone mount command.

B2 Cloud