Best way to backup to encrypted remote

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you NCW and team for building this awesome product.

I have a general question regarding backing up my files to encrypted remote. I have been using sync with - - checksum - - backup-dir and - - suffix($date) flags and runing an infinite loop to backup through everything. I have noticed that it will run through the backup and on second pass completely move the files to backup directory. In turn uploading all files again.

Question, what is the best way to achieve this. I would like to backup everything in my given folder amd if I have deleted anything move to backup directory and continuously running in the background without haveing to reupload files that are already uploaded. so, I don’t have to do anything.

Currently I am using rclone 1.42 in Ubuntu VM with nfs mounted shares. I am using my unlimited google drive given from my University. I do not want to store my files unencrypted.

Appreciate your help.

That is the strange part! If nothing has changed on the source then rclone should do nothing.

Can you show the command line you are using?

If you run with -v then rclone will tell you a lot more about what is going on and it will tell you why it uploads each file.

If you run with -vv you’ll get debug info which can be useful tracking down problems.

Thank you Nick for your reply.

I was using rclone -c -v sync /media/HD unicrypt:/Backups/ --backup-dir unicrypt:/old/ --suffix="-date-$(date)" --copy-links --syslog

However, It appears that somehow the VM must have lost connectivity with NFS share and end up copying files over to --backup-dir multiple times as I can see there are files which hasn’t been copied to unicrypt:/Backups/ It appears I need to investigate this NFS share issue.

I only discovered this after running

2018/08/10 21:14:46 DEBUG : rclone: Version “v1.42” starting with parameters [“rclone” “-c” “-vv” “sync” “/media/HD” “unicrypt:/Backups/” “–dry-run” “–backup-dir” “unicrypt:/old/” “–suffix=-date-Fri 10 Aug 21:14:46 AEST 2018” “–copy-links” “–log-file=/media/HD/Stuff/MediaServer/rcloneunicrypt-Testing.log”]

Where I could see files that are the same and files that are going to be copied and checked in the rclone folder and voila the files weren’t there.

Apologies for the trouble as I should have checked with --vv and --dry-run flag before posting.

Problems solved.

No worries - talking things over always helps!

Ok, I have confirmed somehow rclone is not taking checksum file dates and size into consideration when syncing to encrypted remote.

I have a script that just runs into infinite loop syncing my NAS to Google drive. I had -vv flag set and found that this is copying file into backup directory even though file hasn’t changed.

8/14/18
10:14:17.000 PM
2018-08-14T22:14:17+10:00 rclone-xi rclone[3441]: Copy/Photos/Webdav/Photos/20171124_110210.jpg: Moved into backup dir
Action = Moved FileName = Copy/Photos/Webdav/Photos/20171124_110210.jpg host = rclone source = /var/log/rclone-xi/rclone-xi-rclone.log sourcetype = rclone
8/14/18
10:14:17.000 PM
2018-08-14T22:14:17+10:00 rclone-xi rclone[3441]: Copy/Photos/Webdav/Photos/20171124_110210.jpg: Moved (server side)
Action = Moved FileName = Copy/Photos/Webdav/Photos/20171124_110210.jpg host = rclone source = /var/log/rclone-xi/rclone-xi-rclone.log sourcetype = rclone

Theses are just couple of examples out of thousands. Please see attached screenshot from Splunk.

55%20pm

Adding more to this. Should it matter if I had originally uploaded with version 1.38 and now I am syncing again with 1.42 ? Is the way 1.38 and 1.42 did checks different ? Can’t really find another reason. I believe this has to do with change in --checksum command.

The checksum algorithm hasn’t changed ever for google drive.

Can you download one of the files and check its md5sum against the local file - that is what rclone will be doing.

Ok, Here is one of the file I have found.

$ md5 /Volumes/PerungoGDrive/old/Clonezilla/2016-09-22-WIN2K2R2MAINSKULL-ACTIVATED/blkdev.list-date-2018-08-14-05-26-00
MD5 (/Volumes/PerungoGDrive/old/Clonezilla/2016-09-22-WIN2K2R2MAINSKULL-ACTIVATED/blkdev.list-date-2018-08-14-05-26-00) = a152a6ed25265bfbcc98c2c03a9be1b4
$ md5 /Volumes/NAS/Clonezilla/2016-09-22-WIN2K2R2MAINSKULL-ACTIVATED/blkdev.list
MD5 (/Volumes/NAS/Clonezilla/2016-09-22-WIN2K2R2MAINSKULL-ACTIVATED/blkdev.list) = a152a6ed25265bfbcc98c2c03a9be1b4

In the above example. PerungoGdrive is my gdrive crypt folder and NAS is my NAS that is getting synced. The file exists on NAS but not on the backup folder but instead has been moved to backup directory.

md5 is exactly the same. Not sure why rclone moved to backup directory.

Can you attach a log with -vv of a complete transfer showing the problem please? I can’t quite figure out what is going on yet - thanks!