Is rclone mount's VFS on-disk local cache 'permanent'?

[durval (Durval Menezes)]

As the title says.

To be more specific, let's say I have a recent rclone (eg, v.1.55.1 or newer) running like

rclone --dir-cache-time=100000h --vfs-cache-max-age=100000h \
    --cache-dir=/LOCAL/CACHE/DIR --vfs-cache-mode=full \
mount REMOTE:REMOTE_DIR /LOCAL/MOUNTPOINT

And it's been running for quite a while, so /LOCAL/CACHE/DIR already has a lot of the remote content cached and is really accelerating accesses.

Then I interrupt rclone via ^C and immediately run it again, keeping the same options as above but with some additional ones (eg, -vv for more detailed logs).

Does this new invocation of rclone 'inherits' the /LOCAL/CACHE/DIR as left by the previous one, or does it lose anything (or worse, has to start caching anew)?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Cheers,
-- Durval.

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@durval

Does this new invocation of rclone 'inherits' the /LOCAL/CACHE/DIR as left by the previous one,

Yes it does. It will scan the cache on startup and run as it did before.

This scanning can take a little while and currently rclone is blocked from starting the mount until it is completed (something we may fix in future).

@durval

or does it lose anything (or worse, has to start caching anew)?

It shouldn't lose anything. If there are data files with no metadata or the other way round rclone will delete these. This could potentially happen on an unclean shutdown, but at worst you are talking about a file or two.

[durval (Durval Menezes)]

Thanks for the detailed, authoritative answer @ncw ! Really appreciated!