How to access SMB/SAMBA with rclone

asdffdsa · November 6, 2023, 10:40pm

note: rclone does have a smb remote but imho, not recommended for production.

lacks modtime support.
lacks file verification using checksum/hash.
relies on an upstream third-party library. i could be wrong, but it has not been updated since Jul 15, 2022
too many bugs/issues at rclone github, including some are waiting on waiting for upstream...
https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+smb

luckily, it is easy to access SMB/SAMBA shares using the os.

on linux:

mount -t cifs -o username="username",password="password" //server/share /mnt/share
rclone ls /mnt/share
umount /mnt/share

on windows:

mount with drive letter

net use x: \\server\share /user:"username" "password"
rclone ls x:\
net use /delete x:

mount without drive letter

net use \\server\share /user:"username" "password"
rclone ls \\server\share
net use /delete \\server\share

ncw · November 8, 2023, 12:29pm

I had a look at the backend code - it does support modtime! So I think the overview page is wrong here

That is true. However if you use it via the local backend then rclone will just read the file content to make hashes, so maybe the smb backend should just do that too? Or maybe optionally?

You are right here. Unfortunately the maintainer of the upstream library has gone quiet.

The consensus from users is that if you can get it connected it works very well and it is quite quick.

However it does not support enterprisey smb shares very well. If you look at the upstream issues you can see that the majority of them are about connecting to enterprisey servers.

asdffdsa · November 12, 2023, 7:52pm

i did a one-line pull request to update the docs.

Update Docs to show SMB remote supports modtime