RClone Mount then encrypt\decrypt and export SMB

Help and Support
1

I am using rclone since years. I moved time ago from Amazon Drive to Google Drive.
I am using rclone to backup with encryption my 8 TB Ubuntu NAS to GDrive
Moreover some parts of my Ubuntu file system are locally encrypted with eCrypt FS

I am asking if the following scenario will work, or not or is a bad idea or what.
The purpose is stop to locally store data on my NAS.

Ubuntu SAMBA exports a filesystem the is a decrypted folder (eCrypt) of an ecrypted one.
The encrypted one lives on GDrive and is locally mounted with Rclone.

2

This should work in theory, however there have been problems exporting rclone mount with SMB. I suggest you give it a go to see if it works for you.

3

Well… I already tried (even if without eCrypt).
I mount un Ubuntu an encrypted GDrive remote, then I export this mountpoint with SAMBA.
Yes it works, but I was trying to understand if this is something let me say… “supported”.
I know that we are not speaking about a commercial product, but Rclone is supported by the community and by you (great work!!!).
I should switch the question, maybe: supported or not… is it recommended?

4

I personally wouldn’t mix Samba and rclone as it just adds layer of complexity to the situation.

I’d get the mount closer to what I need (if possible) and just do the work there.

5

I mean it should work technically and there is no reason you couldn’t do it this way but samba over another fuse mount seems to come up a lot for performance problems and other issues. The answer is really you can if it fits your use case and works the way you want it.

From a architecture perspective, less layers is almost always better. When you intermix products like that, you have the potential to come up with issues where it is difficult to debug and understand whether the problem is with one layer or the other.

6

I understand that simple things are better.
Today i have 8 TB NAS @ my home and a lot of devices connected to this NAS (tablets, smartphones, TV, media players, etc.). I Use GDrive for backup my data.

The idea is to avoid storing locally and leverage just on the cloud, so… empty the local Ubuntu NAS and just let to Ubuntu to export what is mounted from GDrive with Rclone.

So… what could be an alternative solution for this use case?

7

Depends on how that data is accessed from the other devices. You could use a webdav or http remotes and have the other products access webdav/http instead but, again, it really depends on your use case.

If webdav won’t work (which I’ll assume it wont) then you’re sorta stuck. You’d have to choose about keeping data local on that NAS and simply backing it up to the cloud or using samba over rclone as you suggested. There aren’t many options to achieve what you want in a seamless fashion besides what you’ve suggested.

A samba rclone remote would be nice as that would completely make this layering issue moot but that doesn’t exist and I believe samba would be pretty complicated to implement as a serve remote.

8

The only protocol that works for all the devices is SAMBA. Kodi works quite well (with some bugs) with HPPS\S and WebDav, but other media players… no.
pCorePlayer (for music) accepts only SAMBA.
Moreover my remote on GDrive is encrypted because I pretend that data on the cloud are managed in this way.
For this reason I tried to leverage on Ubuntu in suggested way to have everything “transparent”