How to Mimic OneDrive Functionality?

Help and Support
1

Hi, new rclone user here. New linux user as well. I recently switched over from windows where I used onedrive. I came upon rclone as a way to continue using onedrive as my cloud provider as I make the switch over to linux. But I'm experiencing some confusion in how exactly to mimic the setup I had on windows.

Here is the functionality I'm hoping to achieve:

  • Have readable/writable local copy of all of my cloud files. I have a folder for this labeled ONEDRIVE on my internal hard drive.
  • When a file is created/deleted/modified/moved in this folder, sync the changes to the cloud.
  • When a file is created/deleted/modified/moved on the cloud, sync the changes to the folder on my pc.

So my question is - What is the best way to achieve this functionality?

Schedule a bisync to run every hour? Mount my onedrive to a directory and tell it to cache everything? Something else entirely? Any help is appreciated.

Version:

- version: rclone v1.67.0
- os/version: fedora 40 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 6.9.9-200.fc40.x86_64
- os/type: linux
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.22.4
- go/linking: static
- go/tags: none
2

Probably rclone mount is the closest to what you described.

Start with:

rclone mount onedrive_remote: /path/to/ONEDRIVE --vfs-cache-mode=full --vfs-cache-max-size 100 GiB

It will use full caching mode but with max cache size 100GiB.

Have a read of docs and maybe add more flags tweaking mount behaviour according to your needs.

1 Like
3

You could mount with a big vfs-cache. This will download files as you need them, and sync them if you do a change, yet if OneDrive version is changed, it won't download the new file until you have the need to open it.

There are some OneDrive freeware alternatives that are meant to behave more like a full OneDrive client. It really depends on what you need and your ultimate goal is. I really like Rclone as it's very robust and supports multiple cloud providers. I don't want nor need a local copy of all my data as my storage is limited and some of the data is just there for backup purposes.

But if you modify a lot of your data and need a active sync copy to your local drive. There are applications out there that might be a better fit.

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4

I am an avid OneDrive users (on macOS) and also an avid rclone users.

Nothing is exactly the same with rclone. You have two options:

  • mount: This gets you pretty close as long as you are online and can send and poll for updates. You may need to tweak some of the timing settings
  • (bi)sync: This is the closest for offline usage but is not automatic

But of course you said:

so you know this.

Personally, I do both (except I use my own sync tool over bisync but that is secondary). I use mount for my main interface but I also have a directory or two that uses bisync (again, my own tool but bisync works fine) either on demand and/or via cron.

I have played with unions of them and I think I can get close but not perfect and can be a bit wonky with edge cases.

One thing to note: you cannot replicate the collaborative editing and live save within Office tools but that also doesn't matter on Linux where you don't have them :person_shrugging:. It's more of an issue on macOS.

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