Rclone copy --update behaviour?

I’m new to rclone and I am trying to make an initial upload of around 200GB to a OneDrive personal account (ISP speed of 8mbps), which I understand will take a couple of days. In order to find the best settings, I’ll cancel out (with ^C) when the transfer rate starts dropping to zero, so this takes a few goes. I’m using the -u (--update) option each time but I’m noticing that the files that were previously uploaded are being uploaded each time. Does the -u flag only work after a successful full upload? Does its order in the options list matter? Here’s the command I issued:

rclone copy -P --stats=5s -u --transfers=16 --checkers=20 --no-unicode-normalization --use-mmap --no-check-dest --retries=1 --onedrive-chunk-size=125M --create-empty-src-dirs ./Files onedrive:Backups

hello and welcome to the forum,

with such a slow connection, i would just use the default values.
should not be hard to max out that connection.

i think the problem is with flag, --no-check-dest, are you sure you need that flag?
as per the docs,
"files are always transferred"
and
"This is a specialized flag which should be ignored by most users!"

the order of flags does not matter.

as for --update, is there are no files in the dest, then the flag does nothing.
are you sure you need that flag?
"This forces rclone to skip any files which exist on the destination and have a modified time that is newer than the source file"

try
rclone copy -P --stats=5s --no-unicode-normalization --use-mmap --create-empty-src-dirs ./Files onedrive:Backups

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--no-check-dest is probably the issue, I think I added it as I read somewhere it helps speed up transfers when the destination is empty. Which by writing that out I am now banging my head on the desk.

Many thanks for this, but I will wait to check this on my next big transfer as I’m 17 hours and 56GB into the current one and I don’t fancy starting again, again! But if I did, then would using --update respect that already uploaded 56GB?

On a related issue, does the overall transfer speed normally decay over the life of a transfer? With the ‘wrong’ settings, this speed would decline to near zero between 5 and 30 minutes. My current settings have seen a much more tolerable reduction from 1010K/s to 999K/s over 17 hours.

you can stop and restart rclone, as long as you remove --update, rclone will compare local to cloud and only copy as per the as per docs.
"Copy the source to the destination. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time"

normally the speed does not decay over time.

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