RCLONE
RCLONE


There are quite a few apps with GUIs available for Macs that let you connect various cloud services to upload, download and move files. Most of them are costly. Today I needed to move files from Google Drive to a kDrive, a cloud storage company in Switzerland, Instead of using one of the expensive apps, I opted for a free command utility, rclone, and in just a few minutes initiated a complete transfer of the data on my drive.

If you've dealt with cloud storage, including iCloud over the past few versions of macOS, you might agree with me that Apple has made a mess of it. They insist on hiding your files away in ~/Library/Cloud Storage and other non-obvious locations. By default, the files stay in the cloud, making utilities like Hazel ineffective managing them. You just never know when you click on a file if you are going to have to wait to download it or not. The official clients for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and Box.com us that strategy. Even when you select the option to keep a folder downloaded, you get no notice that the download is complete and, in my experience, I have found that the settins revert from time to time with no notice, forcing me to redownload files.

So, I was really happy today to take the time to set up rclone to move the files. You can get a good overview of rclone's history and capabilities from Wikipedia.. You can use rclone with a long list of cloud services.

You can download and install rclone right On a Mac from the terminal, using the command

sudo -v ; curl [rclone.org/install.s...](https://rclone.org/install.sh) | sudo bash

Documentation

You can read the documentation on rclone at the official GitHub repository.

Here are links on how to set rclone for a few common services:

Full Compatibility List

GUI Alternatives

File Managers/Browsers

FTP/SFTP/Cloud Clients

Mounters (Network Drive Mappers)

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