How do you unmount an rclone drive on windows?

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I used the mount command on windows 10, through a cmd window, to mount a remote drive on a ubuntu server via sftp. I gave the command a –no-console switch, thereby I ended up with a mounted drive without a cmd window. A drive mounted without the –no-console switch would persist until the cmd window is closed; but this one had no cmd window and I found no unmount command in the documentation.

Can someone please point me to some information or tell me how to unmount this drive? I found one message on this forum for unmounting drives using fuse on linux; but this drive in on windows.

This page:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/console/generateconsolectrlevent?redirectedfrom=MSDN

talks about sending a group of processes a “Ctl-C” from the console that is shared with the process to be ended (or that is how I understood it). It does not help me because I do not have the console anymore.

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

rclone v1.69.1
- os/version: Microsoft Windows 10 Home 22H2 22H2 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 10.0.19045.5487 (x86_64)
- os/type: windows
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.24.0
- go/linking: static
- go/tags: cmount

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

SFTP

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\rclone\rclone.exe mount ubuntu:receive/ Z: --log-file %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\rclone\logs\log.txt

Please run 'rclone config redacted' and share the full output. If you get command not found, please make sure to update rclone.

[ubuntu]
type = sftp
host = WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ
user = ubuntu
key_file = C:\Users\bbbb\.ssh\id_ed25519.pem
known_hosts_file = C:\Users\bbbb\.ssh\known_hosts
ssh =
shell_type = bash
skip_links = true
idle_timeout = 10m0s

A log from the command that you were trying to run with the -vv flag

2025/03/08 19:41:38 DEBUG : rclone: Version "v1.69.1" starting with parameters ["C:\\Users\\ayoub\\Desktop\\rclone\\rclone.exe" "mount" "ubuntu:receive" "Z:" "--log-file" "C:\\Users\\ bbbb\\Desktop\\rclone\\logs\\log.txt" "-vv"]
2025/03/08 19:41:38 DEBUG : Creating backend with remote "ubuntu:receive"
2025/03/08 19:41:38 DEBUG : Using config file from "C:\\Users\\ bbbb\\Desktop\\rclone\\rclone.conf"
2025/03/08 19:41:39 DEBUG : sftp://ubuntu@WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22/receive: New connection 192.168.0.177:52030->WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22 to "SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_9.6p1 Ubuntu-3ubuntu13.8"
2025/03/08 19:41:39 DEBUG : sftp://ubuntu@WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22/receive: Shell type "bash" from config
2025/03/08 19:41:39 DEBUG : sftp://ubuntu@WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22/receive: Relative path resolved to "/home/ubuntu/receive"
2025/03/08 19:41:39 DEBUG : sftp://ubuntu@WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22/receive: Using root directory "/home/ubuntu/receive"
2025/03/08 19:41:39 INFO  : sftp://ubuntu@WWW.XXX.YYY.ZZZ:22/receive: poll-interval is not supported by this remote
2025/03/08 19:41:39 DEBUG : Network mode mounting is disabled
2025/03/08 19:41:39 CRITICAL: Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: mountpoint path already exists: Z:

I have not done anything with the drive except mount it.

1 Like
2

Any reason why not to right click on it and choose "Eject/Unmount" or whatever else it is called on Windows?

If you have to do it programmatically then there is RC interface mount/unmount command:

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3

if you are running a single instance of rclone.exe, then try
taskkill /im rclone.exe

and in the debug log, should see

The service rclone has been stopped.
DEBUG : S3 bucket zork: Destroy: 
DEBUG : S3 bucket zork: >Destroy: 
DEBUG : Not calling host.Unmount as mount already Destroyed
DEBUG : Unmounted successfully
ERROR : b:\rclone\mount\zork: Unmounted rclone mount
DEBUG : rclone: Version "v1.69.1" finishing with parameters ["d:\\data\\rclone\\rclone.exe" "mount" "wasabi01:zork" "b:\\rclone\\mount\\zork" "--log-file=.\\log.mount.zork.txt" "--log-level=DEBUG" "--no-console"]
1 Like
4

Thanks Kapitainsky, the "Eject" works for things like a USB drive. In my case that option does not show up. The API probably works for a remote Unix server; my issue happens on a local windows machine. Thanks for your reply. asdffdsa's suggestion worked.

5

Thanks asdffdsa, "taskkill /im rclone.exe /F" worked. BATCH is apparently more powerful than what it was when DOS was state of the art; it is something totally different. I do not recall such command.

6

Hi,

Here is an alternate message that you might find easy to use.

I use a free utility called NSSM to create services that run rclone to mount a remote.

I have it set to run automatically when Windows boots.

While Windows is running you can simply run the services app and start and stop rclone as necessary and if you have like I do more than one remote mounted you can stop one of them without killing the task process for the program.

7

that works but has not been updated in 4 years.

windows has task manager, which has a nice GUI for starting tasks to run at boot, on a schedule, or on demand.
if you search the forum, i have posted detailed examples.

8

Thanks, I will check them out.

9

Hi,

Correct the software has not been updated in years but that is not even 0.0% and issue because software works perfectly well it doesn't do any errors or create any problems.

I use it with both Windows 10 and windows 11 to Launch rclone as a service.

There are other methods to add our clone as a service in Windows only none of them are easier or work as well as NSSM does.

If you search the internet you can find instructions on how to use a Powershell script to install our clone as a service but it's rather complicated and I gave up. NSSM has a nice graphical user interface and it works reliably so I don't care how many years old it is. I don't know of any bugs that I would report.

A tip if you try it is that you need to change the default service from starting as a system user to starting as your user account that you log into windows with.