Does rclone write to disk when copying from remote to remote?

Help and Support
1

I have two remotes
remoteA:
remoteB:

From what I understand, when I use the following command:
rclone copy remoteA:/exampleDir remoteB:/exampleDir

rclone will download files to my computer from remoteA:/exampleDir and then reupload them to remoteB:/exampleDir.

My question is, during this process, does rclone download these files to my hard drive, or keep all contents within RAM?

I ask this question because if I am copying a large amount of data between two remotes (several terabytes), then my disk would have to undergo several terabytes worth of read/write which may degrade it (over time), so it's something I would like to know before proceeding.

2

hello and welcome to the forum.

it is a simple question with a complex answer

each cloud provider is different so please provide the needed info so we can help you.

who is the provider for?
remoteA:
remoteB:

the short answer is that rclone uses ram, the amount can be tweaked.
rclone does not need to to use the hard drives for transfer.

but depending on your remotes, no ram and no hard drives would be used for transfer.
what we call a server side transfer

3

Thanks!
I am trying to do 2 copies,

the first is from Google Drive to Google Drive
the second is from Google Drive to OneDrive

from you answer, I'm assuming that neither would use my hard drive, correct?

4

correct, in both cases, rclone would use your hard drive.

for gdrive to gdrive, you read read this.
https://rclone.org/drive/
and this, which would mean no ram used on your computer and no downloading and uploading of data.
https://rclone.org/drive/#drive-server-side-across-configs

for gdrive to onedrive,
a small amount of ram would be used.
all data would have to be downloaded from gdrive to to your computer and copied to onedrive.
no hard drive would be used.

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5

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