Rclone - an introduction. Sync files to the cloud with ease!

(This guide was written specifically for Ubuntu 16.04, however rclone is compatible with many operating systems)

Throughout my somewhat short, definitely amazing journey with linux and ubuntu, I have often had the need to sync local files to the cloud, and wasn't exactly sure of the best way to do this.

Backing up files for example is always a task for which i'd prefer to use the cloud, rather than external media. I've also been working on a couple github projects - rclone is perfect for pushing local data to a repo as well.

You can use it to sync files to various cloud providers, with a relatively simple command line interface. Best of all, it's free as is usually the case with ubuntu/linux tools.

I've also put together a script that should make downloading and installing rclone a snap!

 sudo apt-get update
 mkdir ~/rclone
 cd ~/rclone
 wget https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-v1.39-linux-amd64.zip
 unzip rclone-v1.39-linux-amd64.zip
 cd ~/rclone/rclone-v1.39-linux-amd64
 ./rclone

The shell script above will update all applications, download the rclone zip archive, and extract the contents to a folder it creates: ~/rclone

It will then run rclone once so you can see the terminal commands associated with the tool.

Be sure to check out the official rclone website for more info:
https://www.rclone.org

The rclone wiki can be found here:
https://github.com/ncw/rclone/wiki