Hello, I'm new to the forum so I hope this category is appropriate. I have rclone working fine to mount my Google Drive (using my own client id and secret of course), but I was wondering if there was a way to configure it to make it better for my flow.
I know that the rate at which files are moved to Google Drive is limited, but it still kinda bugs me when I'm trying to do things in the file system. So, is there anyway for me to have Google Drive mounted to my file system, but allow my computer to make changes more quickly locally (i.e. copy a lot of files), and let rclone sync them more slowly over time in the background? It would be nice, since I could have the benefit of working on my Google Drive just like it is a normal file system on my computer, but still let it sync.
Ah, interesting! I did not realize that. Thanks for the link!
However, I followed a guide somewhere on the forum for using systemd to auto-mount the drive, and that guide included flags for vfs cache (among others):
--config=%h/.config/rclone/rclone.conf
--allow-non-empty
--vfs-cache-mode writes
--vfs-cache-max-size 100M
--dir-cache-time 72h
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit 128M
--vfs-read-chunk-size-limit off
--log-level DEBUG
--log-file /tmp/rclone-%i.log
--umask 022
According to my logs, the vfs cache is nowhere near its limit (only around 12 Mi right now), but copying files is still extremely slow. I apologize, but I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding or doing something wrong here. Should my files be copying over more quickly on my side with this configuration?
I mean, yes. But that was the point of my post. I'm hoping there might be a way to have files move to my mounted file system as fast as it does the rest of my local file system, just syncing with remote may be slower.
Though, importantly, I do sometimes make changes to the remote from other devices, so I do want my local copy to pull those changes as well. Again, maybe I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how rclone works.
I know. I was saying that a potential solution for me would ideally not change that.
On Windows, I used the Google Drive app and mounted my university drive to my file system, and was able to work on it as if it were my own file system. I’m hoping I might be able to tweak rclone to be similar to that. Like I said, I know that rclone is limited by Google’s API, but I would love to be able to work in the mounted file system as if it is my native file system, but still syncs with remote (even if it means my remote might be behind my local mount).
My VFS cache does not seem to be helping with that, though, because files I copy to my drive (rather than read from remote) don’t seem to appear in the cache.
This fixed it, actually! Everything is way faster now. Thanks, and sorry for the long journey to get there! I didn't realize how much of a difference it would make from writes when I was reading the docs, and got nervous about the warning of not all filesystems supporting "sparse" files.