Final word
I just set up a new headless Raspberry Pi zero with rclone and it works 100%.
pi@zero:~ $ sudo apt install rclone
pi@zero:~ $ rclone config
I ran through the setup for connecting to Google Drive.
Then I set the rclone.conf permissions like this...
pi@zero:~ $ cd /home/pi/.config/rclone
pi@zero:~/.config/rclone $ sudo chown pi:pi rclone.conf
pi@zero:~/.config/rclone $ sudo chmod 644 rclone.conf
pi@zero:~/.config/rclone $ ls -la
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 pi pi 4096 Nov 6 12:26 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 pi pi 4096 Nov 2 13:37 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 pi pi 434 Nov 6 23:04 rclone.conf
Then I made a bash script called google.sh stored at /home/pi/* but it could be anywhere...
#!/bin/bash
if pidof -o %PPID -x "google.sh"; then
exit 1
fi
# cron calls this to move files from local/source to cloud:destination
rclone move /home/pi/files/ Google:/rpi/
exit
I made it executable
pi@zero:~ $ sudo chmod a+x /home/pi/google.sh
I put test files into /home/pi/files and ran the google.sh script
pi@zero:~ $ /home/pi/google.sh
It worked.
Then I made a quick python script named 'call.py'
#!/usr/bin/python
import subprocess
subprocess.call(['sh','/home/pi/google.sh'])
It calls the 'google.sh' script. I ran it...
pi@zero:~ $ python call.py
It worked.
Then I entered crontab like this...
pi@zero:~ $ crontab -e
And I pasted the following command in there.
# auto backup /home/pi/files/ to Google:/rpi/
*/1 * * * * /home/pi/google.sh >/dev/null 2>&1
I put some more test files in /home/pi/files/ and after a minute they moved up to the Google Drive.
That's it. It works. It's replicatable. I can cloud connect my IoT projects. I hope this helps someone. Thanks.