How to synchronize the entire disk (absolutely all files on the disk, including system and hidden ones) using rclone?

Help and Support
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What is the problem you are having with rclone?

Hello everyone! I'm new to rclone. My goal is to use it as a program to synchronize and create a backup of my entire work computer. Because I already face data loss too often:(And here's the question itself: what command to synchronize the entire disk (absolutely all files on the disk, including system and hidden ones) using rclone? Thank you all so much for your help!<<<

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

rclone v1.63.1

  • os/version: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro 22H2 (64 bit)
  • os/kernel: 10.0.22621.2134 (x86_64)
  • os/type: windows
  • os/arch: amd64
  • go/version: go1.20.6
  • go/linking: static
  • go/tags: cmount <<<

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

GoogleDrive <<<

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

->>>

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welcome to the forum,

no such program exists, no way to do that.
the best you can get is run rclone as system user.

on windows, for bare-metal backup and recovery, i use veeam agent.

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Thanks for the quick response! That is, if you run on behalf of the admin and enter the command: (rclone sync "C:" "namdedrive:/" -v -P), then he will copy everything and then, when the command is repeated, he will already synchronize and check for changes and make them, right?

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I apologize in advance for my English...

5

nope, you would need to run rclone as system user, not admin user.
and what you plan to do about in-use system files???

even if you first create a VSS snapshot, using my handy dandy wiki, rclone will still fail.
https://github.com/rclone/rclone/wiki/How-to-enable-VSS-for-rclone

that would be C:\, not C:

let's take this case:

  1. your system is hacked with ransomware.
  2. as a result, cannot even boot your machine.

for that, rclone is useless.
you would have to re-install windows from scratch, do windows updates and re-install all apps.

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I'm going to store them all on my Google drive :slight_smile: It's just that in this case, if something happens to my PC, then I can always recover data from Google drive. (I understand that I will not be able to restore the entire system as an OS, but it just makes me feel safer)

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ok, give your command a try.
you will find, in practice, it will not work.

in my case, over 520,000 files.
and if you think you can backup all those individual files to gdrive, good luck.

gdrive is a terrible, horrible choice for that.
Drive has quite a lot of rate limiting. This causes rclone to be limited to transferring about 2 files per second only

even if you run rclone as system user and create a VSS snapshot, there will be a huge number of files and folders rclone cannot backup and will error out.
you will have to hunt down every error and add it to an exclusion list using --exclude-from

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In fact, it's enough for me that rclone will copy the entire system as files or a directory, and I'm trying to figure out if rclone will copy all the files on the system disk as much as possible (especially hidden ones) (I'm just trying to figure out which command to run for optimization, acceleration, transfer, read, write and synchronization itself in general? Also, so that rclon ignores errors like: "there is no access to the file because it is a system file." Even the slightest changes will do, given that my maximum Internet is 4MB \ S, and the information is 4TB of data.)

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Well, that's a pity. I will try to start copying files through rclone, and through AirExplorer or veeam agent I will download the rest of the files that have not been copied. Thank you very much for your help and clarification. Have a nice day :slight_smile:

10

another good choice is restic

1 Like
11

Just use Backblaze Personal Backup, it backup the hole PC for 50$ a YEAR! ...

12

good suggestion, there are so many options.

veeam agent is free, can be used for disaster recovery, restore to dissimilar hardware as acronis is famous for.
i use vagent to backup windows machines and then rclone copy to cloud.

in addition, veeam backup and replication is also free to use on 10 machines, legal to use in a pro-profit commercial company.
so you can backup any combination of windows desktops, windows servers and/or virtual machines

bonus is that veeam has a fantastic forum, same as rclone

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