rclone_skill

Overview

This skill uses rclone to upload, sync, and manage files across many cloud providers (S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Google Drive, Dropbox, and S3-compatible endpoints). It helps prepare the environment, run transfers with useful flags, and verify or troubleshoot results. The skill focuses on practical commands and configuration snippets to get reliable uploads and mirrors.

How this skill works

It first checks that rclone is installed and that at least one remote is configured, guiding through installation or interactive rclone config when needed. It provides concrete rclone commands for copy, sync, listing, dry-runs, and size- or pattern-based filters. It also recommends useful flags for progress, parallelism, bandwidth limits, and multipart handling for large files. Finally, it offers verification commands and common troubleshooting steps for connection or config issues.

When to use it

• Upload single files (images, videos, documents) to cloud buckets or drives.
• Mirror a local directory to cloud storage or perform incremental backups.
• Transfer large video files with multipart/chunked uploads.
• Preview changes before applying with dry-run to avoid accidental deletes.
• Connect and manage multiple providers (S3, R2, B2, Drive, Dropbox).

Best practices

• Always run the setup check: confirm rclone is installed and remotes are configured before transfers.
• Use --dry-run for risky operations, especially before rclone sync which can delete remote files.
• Use --progress and -v for visibility; add --retries and --transfers to make large transfers resilient and faster.
• Set --s3-chunk-size for large files and use checksum or --checksum where integrity matters.
• Limit bandwidth with --bwlimit and filter with --include/--exclude to avoid transferring unnecessary files.

Example use cases

• Copy a single video to an S3 bucket: rclone copy /path/video.mp4 remote:bucket/path/ --progress
• Mirror a photo folder to Cloudflare R2: rclone sync /photos r2:bucket/photos/ --progress --bwlimit=10M
• Dry-run a sync to preview deletions: rclone sync /local/path remote:bucket/ --dry-run
• Resume interrupted large uploads with retries: rclone copy large.mp4 remote:bucket/ --s3-chunk-size=64M --retries=5 --progress
• List and inspect remote contents before transfer: rclone lsd remote:bucket/ and rclone lsl remote:bucket/path/