...

rclone is an immensely powerful tool for copying and synchronising data from one location to another - here we only consider object storage, but it is capable of far more.  See the rclone website & documentation linked at the bottom of this page.

Configure rclone

Interactive rclone configuration

1.Run rclone config and follow the interactive configuration for a new remote (basically the location of the bucket on the internet, accessible from a certain endpoint and with specific credentials if private):

...

acl : select the one that best fits your use case

Finalize it and save

Manual configuration

private bucket

Edit ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf with your editor of choice and insert a block like this:

...

You should then be able to perform basic commands as below, e.g. rclone ls EWC-objectstorage:bucketname/path/ 

public bucket

[EWC-objectstorage-public]
type = s3
provider = Other
endpoint = https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com
access_key_id =
secret_access_key =

Basic commands with rclone

The following sections describe some commands that you can perform with rclone once you configure your remote see above. In particular:

• PATH_DIRECTORY is the directory path in the remote

• REMOTE_NAME is the name you gave to a remote created with the rclone config command (see above). You can check your configured remotes using the following command:

  Code Block
  rclone listremotes

  Note: Rclone configuration should be available at the following path: ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf

List objects in the bucket

rclone ls is used to list the objects in the path with size and path. Use the command below:

rclone ls <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY>

Create a directory in the remote

rclone mkdir is used to create a directory on the path you want in your bucket.  Note that the concept of a directory isn't entirely real on object storage - see https://medium.com/datamindedbe/the-mystery-of-folders-on-aws-s3-78d3428803cb for a good explanation.

rclone mkdir <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY>

List a directory in the remote

rclone lsd is used to list directories in the remote.  This is also useful for seeing what buckets are on the remote (only the ones you created with these credentials - there may be others you didn't create but were granted access to)

rclone lsd <REMOTE_NAME>:

Copy file to remote

rclone copy is used to copy files or whole directory structures from your local machine to the remote bucket.  It's very similar to rsync -av  and mirrors the local structure up to the remote, only copying when there are differences.

...

rclone copy file.txt <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY>

Sync data to remote

rclone sync <SOURCE_DIRECTORY>/ <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY>

where SOURCE_DIRECTORY is a local directory with files you want to sync to remote.  This is similar to copy, but also deletes files on the remote that aren't present on the local directory (e.g. like rsync -av --delete )

Advanced commands with rclone

Mounting object storage on the filesystem

rclone mount --daemon <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY> /path/on/my/filesystem

...

This form of the command only allows the user running it to see the files - the option --allow-other (potentially in combination with others listed on https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/) will allow others access.

Sync large amount of data to remote

rclone sync -P --s3-chunk-size=256M --transfers=24 <SOURCE_DIRECTORY>/ <REMOTE_NAME>:<PATH_DIRECTORY>

...

• -P flag tells to provide statistics to stdout
• --s3-chunk-size=256 The chunk size for a transfer in kilobytes; must be a power of 2 and at least 256. Each chunk is buffered in memory prior to the transfer, so increasing this increases how much memory is used.
• --transfers=24 tells to use 24 threads

Resources

• Rclone official documentation: https://rclone.org/
• Sync files from cloud storage: https://www.tecmint.com/rclone-sync-files-from-cloud-storage/

...