Hello, I am using rclone on my Windows computer and I am just curious what is the proper way to backup a whole drive. In this case I will be backing up to Google Drive. I understand that I can use rclone sync or copy, however my concern is that I am going to do the uploading in chunks. For example, if the drive is 100gb I may upload 10gb per day. Is there a way to resume the rclone sync/copy? I know that the way they work I could start them over and I won’t get any duplicates, however I assume for rclone to do the sync and copy it will have to be checking Google Drive first to figure out what it already has done, and what it needs which may take a fair amount of time if I’ve already uploaded 90gb.
Is there a way to instead just resume a previous upload? I understand that my previous 90gb uploaded for example may be out of sync later, but that is fine. Maybe it doesn’t take long for rclone to recheck if the files are there, but I can’t really imagine it being a short time with having to check 90gb on Google Drive.
Any suggestions for the best process here?
I’m essentially trying to backup a drive while I am using the computer, I don’t want to have to leave it running 24/7 for the next couple weeks
Other than by starting the sync again, no, not at the moment.
That is correct. However it isn’t the size of the data that will take the time - it is how many files and how many directories. By default rclone will just check the size and modification time with drive which is very quick.
To give you an idea of the speed, my drive account enumerates 1,000 files in 18 seconds in a test directory structure which has about 10 files per directory.
That is the way rclone was designed to be used - you shouldn’t find it too slow!
Also if you want rclone to run backups while you are using the computer you might want to look at the --bwlimit option.
Thanks for the reply! Very helpful! And thank you for the mention of the --bwlimit, that is an option I already was planning to make good use of for this. It’s definitely going to take many weeks to get all the data there so trying to avoid as many slowdowns as I can.
I will be working with a disk that has 66 455 folders, and 420 752 files. The disk is a total of 551 GB large. Windows itself took a good 2 minutes just to tell me that about the drive, that is why I see there being quite a slower speed when it comes to Google Drive.
Well, if the OP were using a Unix-based OS (say, Linux), then a simple “kill -STOP” to rclone would be enough to suspend it, until time comes to resume it with “kill -CONT”.
