Does sync make a local copy and then upload the file

Help and Support
1

A general question. I am running version v1.56.0 under linux and connecting to OneDrive

My steps:

% rclone --vfs-cache-mode writes mount "onedrive": ~/oneDrive

This mounts as expected in my home directory. Next I have a large directory tree (lets say 500GB) of videos files and directories. I want to have a backup of that directory tree on OneDrive.

I do this:

% cd ~Videos
% rclone sync "2018/" "~/oneDrive/Videos/2018/"

This brings the contents of directory 2018 and all its subdirectories to that mount point ~/oneDrive and eventually makes the files available in my OneDrive account in the cloud under Video. That is what I expect.

Observation: The rclone sync happens so fast that it must be making a local copy and then over the next day or so given my slow upload speeds pushes the data up to my OneDrive account.

Question: what happens to this local copy under the ~/onedrive mount point after it's been uploaded to OneDrive. Does the data expire after it has been uploaded or do I now have 2 copies on my local disk. I will not have enough disk space for 2 copies to continue this method. If I stop the first rclone mount process and umount ~/oneDrive the files are gone. How do I remove that extra copy under oneDrive without affecting the backup in the cloud. I think I was suppose to use rclone copy instead of rclone sync perhaps.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks for any advice in advance

Jim

2

hello and welcome to the forum,

that is correct, as per the documentation https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/#vfs-cache-mode-writes
"write only and read/write files are buffered to disk first."

if you want to sync files from local to onedrive, then use rclone sync without rclone mount
rclone sync ~/Videos/2018 onedrive:Videos/2018
in this case, no need for rclone mount, no need for a buffer, no issue of running out of disk space.

3

Thank you. That makes sense.

4

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