Rclone has massively grown with so many features now. Just the other day I was thinking what cool feature it could have that can make it easier for us.
I was with my friend who hoard data in gdrive, just like me, and then he casually say that he can copy his data to any of rclone compatible end point.
Then it got me thinking, what if rclone has something that we can give to our friend so that they can send us, without giving out rclone credentials. Just like having an email address… You know like, someday we can say : hey i have the latest blablabla, just give me your ‘rclone address’ and I’ll upload it to you.
(Actually I can’t recommend Keybase because of some fundamental design flaws they won’t fix, but I bring it up because I think the essence of what you’re asking for already exists.)
Well sort of like that, something that abstract and hide the need to share our rclone config credential and let people upload to ours, not share, but upload.
For example this simple web app abstract and hide the owner of the file when we share file in Google drive : https://drive.pahe.in
The person who copy your file into their own Google drive does not know your Google drive account etc. That is like doing rclone copy server side copy without giving out your rclone config. This is good, it bypass Google copy limitation, potential future flagging etc.
As a start, drive only thing is perfect. My point was that if we have some abstraction layer that make it simple for us to transfer files between friends I think rclone will be used more widely beyond researchers and enthusiasts.
Once we have an abstract layer, surely someone will pick it up at their weekend project to build a gui or something.
I’ll try this feature. I’ve been using rclone+samba which works great but it’s only for home network.