Rclone delete vs. Rclone purge

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1

I'm just simply curious about these two commands, and which is more effective.

Using Google Drive, I tried each command on two seperate accounts. Each folder, on each account had roughly 1TB of data:

Account 1:
rclone purge "gdrive1:Folder A"

Account 2:
rclone delete "gdrive2:Folder A"

The purge command was literally instant. The delete command is taking alot longer to finish.
I'm curious what differentiates the two commands.

Does rclone purge just move the folder and contents to the trash, whereas rclone delete takes the time to actually delete the files (minus the folder stucture)?

Thanks for any input and advice!

2

hi,
if you run the command with debug output, you can see exactly what happens.
add -vv to the command.

3

On google drive that is what it does. On other backends (which can't remove a folder and subcontents) it will iterate it and remove all the files individually.

Yes that is what rclone delete does. You can use filters with it (unlike rclone purge) which is probably the main practical difference.

4

I appreciate that, thanks for clearing that up for me.

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5

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