some cloud providers, in this case i am talking about onedrive, have a shadow copy-like feature that lets you view/restore previous versions of files. sometimes this can give you a "backup of a backup" like feature, and is handy for numerous recovery options.
my question was, if rclone can somehow take advantage of this feature. i am presently not aware of how it would work, but it would be a nice addition if it were possible 
jared
It is supported for some remotes - check for example versioning topic in S3 remote docs.
As for OneDrive - not everything what OneDrive offers via its web UI or native client is available using API. You would have to investigate it first. Then you can create github feature request or ideally submit PR.
hi @jared, i think in the past, we did private messages, and i have written about it in the forum,
but for anyone else who might wander into this topic.
i use veeam backup and replication. each incremental|full backup is a single file.
can be used to restore individual version of files, restore partitions, bare-metal restore entire machine over the internet.
the paid version has native support for cloud providers.
the free edition, simply, use rclone mount to access the backup file
perhaps there doesn't need to be a reliance on onedrive. instead, maybe the --backup-dir=X://whatever could have an additional flag that goes --versionhistory=n for the amount of outdated files are kept on hand. that way, rclone would have its own system that worked with ANY remote.
our pm conversation helped me over a bump at the time, and i still appreciate it. and i have since advanced even further. however, we did leave veeam behind for some better options. (well, better for us) so ideally, i could do this without involving veeam.