Rclonelink file not created

Help and Support
1

Hi all,

I really like Rclone for it's ability to convert symlinks from Linux systems to the .rclonelink file on filesystems that does not support symlinks.
That being said, I am a little puzzled how and when this works.
E.g. I have mounted both source and destination filesystems and I do:

rclone copy -l /source/ /destination/

Then the links flag seems to be ignored.
Although, if I define the destination as a SFTP host then the .rclonelink files are created.

rclone copy -l --sftp-host localhost --sftp-key-file .ssh/id_ed25519 /source/ :sftp:/destination/

The target disk is a local mounted disk formated as exfat. Thus, no symlinks are allowed, but why do I need to make this "hack" to save the symlinks as rclonelink files?

2

rclone assumes that links are supported by local storage. It can not detect your exfat disk behind the local mount.

.rclonelink are designed to work on remote storage destinations, not local ones.

3

Thanks kapitainsky,
I kind of realized that, but in the light of Rclone being the Swizz Army knife of file transfer programs, it could be nice if there was a flag or backend to force rclonelink creation if "--links" is enabled?
E.g. a local_win backend?

Or that Rclone did a symlink creation test on target if "--links" is enabled?

5

You should be able to do this something like this I think

rclone copy :local,links:/source/ /destination/
6

Cool, thanks Nick.