Can bisync report on changed files?

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1

For a number of years I’ve been using grive2 to sync my local files to Google Drive. But I’m migrating from RedHat to Debian and so I thought I’d use rclone for this (to avoid another tool; I’m already using it elsewhere).

So

rclone bisync -L . grive: 2>&1 | grep -v ' bisync is IN BETA. Don.t use in production!'

And this works. But it’s quiet. If I add the -v flag then I get a lot of debug output.

`
2025/08/17 22:40:30 INFO  : Setting --ignore-listing-checksum as neither --checksum nor --compare checksum are set.
2025/08/17 22:40:30 INFO  : Bisyncing with Comparison Settings:
{
        "Modtime": true,
        "Size": true,
        "Checksum": false,
        "HashType1": 0,
        "HashType2": 0,
        "NoSlowHash": false,
        "SlowHashSyncOnly": false,
        "SlowHashDetected": true,
        "DownloadHash": false
}
2025/08/17 22:40:30 INFO  : Synching Path1 "local{12rtk}:/home/sweh/Google-Drive/" with Path2 "grive:/"
2025/08/17 22:40:30 INFO  : Building Path1 and Path2 listings
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : Path1 checking for diffs
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : - Path1    File was deleted          - foooo
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : Path1:    1 changes:    0 new,    0 modified,    1 deleted
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : Path2 checking for diffs
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : Applying changes
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : - Path2    Queue delete              - grive:/foooo
2025/08/17 22:40:39 INFO  : - Path1    Do queued copies to                - Path2
2025/08/17 22:40:40 INFO  : foooo: Deleted
2025/08/17 22:40:40 INFO  : There was nothing to transfer
2025/08/17 22:40:40 INFO  : Updating listings
2025/08/17 22:40:41 INFO  : Validating listings for Path1 "local{12rtk}:/home/sweh/Google-Drive/" vs Path2 "grive:/"
2025/08/17 22:40:41 INFO  : Bisync successful
2025/08/17 22:40:41 INFO  :
Transferred:              0 B / 0 B, -, 0 B/s, ETA -
Checks:              4100 / 4100, 100%
Deleted:                1 (files), 0 (dirs), 7 B (freed)
Elapsed time:        10.7s

We seem to have “no output” vs “debug output”.

The old answer was “don’t use -v” but use “--stats-log-level NOTICE” but that just provides a summary of what happened, not a list of files updated/deleted.

Is there a flag that will tell me what happened?

(FWIW, rclone v1.69.0, but I doubt this has changed in latter versions)

2

With -v you should get an INFO log per file transfer/delete.

I don't think bisync supports the file change logging that sync does though @nielash ?

1 Like
3

The logger flags are not supported at the moment, but adding them would be a good idea, and not terribly difficult. Perhaps it should be -–missing-on-path1 and –-missing-on-path2 instead of --missing-on-dst and --missing-on-src. Alternatively, I suppose it could log separately in each direction.

4

In my mind the goal would be to have lines such as

foo copied to remote (new)
foo copied to remote (updated)
foo copied from remote (new)
foo copied from remote (updated)
foo deleted in remote, deleting locally
foo deleted locally, deleting in remote

or some such thing, so it’s easy to see what the result of a run was. Keeping the log messages consistent(ish) with the one-way-sync is a bonus!

My goal (in this instance) is to replace the old unmaintained “grive2” program with the well maintained “rclone”, since I’m already using it :slight_smile: But the results should be useful for other people.

5

To clarify: those log lines already exist with -v. Your example didn’t really show it because there wasn’t anything to copy, but you can see it with the one delete:

2025/08/17 22:40:40 INFO  : foooo: Deleted

It sounds like you would prefer to suppress some of the other things that also get logged at the INFO level, like Building Path1 and Path2 listings. While I hear that, there are other users who find those useful and there’s probably no one setting that would make everybody happy. (There is already a -vv DEBUG level that is much, much noisier.) Consider that the Building Path1 and Path2 listings stage took only 9 seconds in your case, but for another user it might take 9 minutes, and they would otherwise have no idea what bisync is doing during that time.

The logger flags are potentially a solution to this (once supported) because you could omit -v and just use –-combined to write the quieter list of paths that you want (to stdout or a file).

6

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