Hello, while I have been running PLEX, Sonarr, Radarr, SABNZBD on a 10 Core Ubuntu VPS for several years, I don't work with Linux often and have a few set command line things that I do for maintenance, etc.. to make sure I don't break it and have to call my friend for a favor. That being said the problem I have is that of space, and at 1.2TB's it's limiting as to what I can keep on the server. I am looking to use rclone to setup a link to Gsuite and make use of Google's unlimited storage. And that's where I am, and am looking for help/advice.
*Is there a tutorial/guide on how to add rclone to a Linux server for use with Plex?
*From looking around it appears that PlexDrive is now obsolete as rclone has caching?
*Is there a benefit to encrypting files in Gsuite using rclone or is it a performance hit when streaming?
Should files from apps download to the GSuite mount or extract to a different folder, then use something else to move the files to mount and have rclone move it over?
I'm sure these are rudimentary questions but would appreciate the help.
Thanks!
A basic setup guide for Plex integratoin is covered in the config guide: https://rclone.org/drive/#i-class-fa-fa-google-i-google-drive
but this only covers the rclone side of things though, not the Plex setup.
Aside from that I'm sure there exists setup guides if you search around. Perhaps this thread can be useful to you:
@Animosity022 is an experienced user and forum-regular who also uses Plex, so he can probably help if you get stuck.
I don't know enough about Plexdrive to say that is it "obsolete" , but from what I understand rclone is generally considered the better tool for the job and should be able to replace it's function.
The main benefit to encryption is more privacy and security - especially if you don't trust Google that much. Doubly so if you have content on the drive that may be subject to copyright. While Google does not seem to (currently) be very aggressive in this regard, they almost certainly do periodic scans off hashes - and if your drive lights up with an excessive amount of hash-hits for known copyrighted material then they are well within their rights to ban your access next time they bother to do a cleanup. Encryption does not have a lot of downsides really. It uses some CPU cycles to encrypt/decrypt on the fly, but this is fairly trivial on a modern PC and only really an issue on micro-servers like a PI for example. Encryption won't slow down transfers or or make streaming slower. The biggest inconvenience may simply be that you can't really share files directly with others without also sharing your encryption key (which you may not want).
In general it is ok for apps to write directly to the Gdrive. Especially if you use cache-mode writes as that allows full emulation of file-operations, so as far as the apps are concerned it will function just like any other drive, just a bit slower. However, you should take special note of any software that writes files piecemeal or uses temporary work files (like torrents, some rendering software ect.). Rclone will assume a file is done when it is closed and upload it, but if that file is only partially done and will be accessed again very soon then you could end up transferring that file back and fourth dozens of times, and that is horribly inefficient. Whenever possible, use temporary workfolders for unfinished files for such programs. Many torrent programs for example have this built into options and will handle moving finished files to their final destination on their own (I use qbittorrent for this).
well, i've managed to get a gdrive, gcrypt, and gcace setup.
rclone mount --allow-other --allow-non-empty gcrypt: ~/mnt/gdrive &
Had no idea where the mounted drive was then found it in my Home directory...not ideal but i'm guessing i can change it to mount to another location.
Question...how do I know if Rclone is encrypting files that go into the mounted gdrive. Are there logs I can look at, or can I look in Gsuite and see the encrypted file?
Yes you can mount it anywhere.
Just change that part to any folder you like:
~/mnt/gdrive
Viewing encrypted files via the crypt mount will make them look normal, so if you aren't 100% sure if you got it right then the easiest thing is probably just to look at your files via the normal goolge webinterface. If they are all garbled then they are being encrypted according to your settings. If they look normal then something is not right. You can of course see this easily in the logs too if you want. if you use the -v flag in your mount command then rclone will tell you more about what is going on in the background. If the crypt remote is working then you will see that all the files being processed also appear garbled.
Thanks...well it works!!, dropped a few test files and checked Google drive, and they are encrypted. I'm a bit surprised with this, as was expecting more fiddling, but it works. The hardest part was during the setup it asked for the Plex username/password which I haven't used in years since it was setup (assuming I got it right..but haven't tested that yet).
Yet another noob question...(sorry) rclone, rcache, rcrypt, and the mount, do these startup on a reboot, or is there something else needed to set that up.
You can just skip (leave empty) any questions about Plex integration if you don't use plex. These are only relevant if you use plex and want to optimize how it talks to rclone.
Rclone will not start anything by itself - so if you want your drive to automatically be mounted on startup then you should schedule a script to run on startup.
On windows this is typically done with Task Scheduler
On Linux this is typically done with Cron
But in theory, any decent scheduler can do this and there does exist third-party alternatives if you should prefer one of those.
Once you have everything set up as you want you may look into running rclone as a background service, but you can read up on that later.
While rclone is configured with various modules, it is still just a single program so you don't have to start multiple things. Just triggering the mounting command you already already use to manually start it is sufficient.
If you need a guide on how to use cron there should be hundreds of these on google I bet, because it's a really common thing to set up for all sorts of administrative tasks
Thank you so much...greatly appreciated. Performance testing and load testing with PLEX now to see if there are any tweaks from Animosity's settings that I can use. Again, thanks.
