rclone is a very nice and very fast CLI for backing up your data to a local or a remote destination.
For over 20 years SyncBack was my default go-to application for backing up by data, I have used both the free and the paid versions without any issues. While it’s a very nice piece of software, it’s a typical windows application that you need to download, install and configure every time and although it’s pretty simple to do so, it was time to move to a simpler, for me, solution.
My requirements were simple:
- Run on windows
- File-based configuration
- One-way mirroring of files
- Flexible mechanism for directory exclusions
Initially I tried robocopy, but the mechanism it uses for exclusions it’s a bit cumbersome, so after searching a bit more I found rclone.
Rclone
Rclone is a command line tool that runs on every major OS, including Windows, it’s exclusions are configurable in files either as globs or as regexes and supports multiple backup modes.
rclone can installed via winget (winget install rclone.rclone)
The exclusions can be configured by adding globs or regexes that match the excluded folders in a configuration file (for example:exclusions.config)
Note that exclusions are relative to the backup source, so to exclude directory D:\temp when the backup source is D:\ , temp\** need to be added to the exclusions file.
After configuring exclusions, rclone’s behaviour can by tested by dry-running it:
\>./rclone ls --dry-run D:\ --exclude-from exclusions.config > logs.txt
The files that would be backed-up are logged in logs.txt . By repeating this flow, the exclusions can be finetuned.
In order to create an actual backup, rclone can be executed with the sync command that copies new and modified files and removes deleted files from the backup target.
\>./rclone sync D:\ S:\backups\mypc --exclude-from exclusions.config
By default rclone will ignore any excluded files even if they exist on destination. The --delete-excluded option can be used to deleted the excluded files from destination (useful if a new exclusions has been added).
Another interesting option is the --backup-dir which can specify a directory in destination to move files that would be deleted by the sync operation (and thus keep.
Rclone seems to be pretty fast also, in my case, my backup consists of about ~250K files (without the exclusions) that range from small source-code files to 20GB video files) and rclone needs about 30seconds to check if any actions are needed, when the --delete-excluded flag is not present. Of course, as it is expected, copying the files takes considerably more time depending on the network and disk speed.