Real time mount between Windows and Google Cloud Storage

I just installed rclone and winfsp yesterday so I can mount our Google Cloud Storage to our Windows server to host our static files. When I run rcloud.exe mount remote://storage-bucket/upload/ C://Users/dean/Desktop/upload it works but the problem is when I put news files in Google Cloud Storage it does not get reflected on C://Users/dean/Desktop/upload but if I put news files in C://Users/dean/Desktop/upload it quickly reflects on Google Cloud Storage.

I wish every file operation on Google Cloud Storage to quickly take effect on the mounted folder in my Windows

Google cloud storage doesn't support change notify so to see new files you will need to wait until the directory cache expires - see --dir-cache-time this is 1 minute by default.

You can also tell rclone to refresh the directory cache using the remote control: https://rclone.org/rc/#vfs-refresh

hello and welcome to the forum,
@ncw, hi, as per the docs, the default is 5m0s

--dir-cache-time duration                Time to cache directory entries for. (default 5m0s)

to enable refresh for your mount, try this
rclone.exe mount remote://storage-bucket/upload/ C://Users/dean/Desktop/upload --dir-cache-time=1m --rc

and to perform a refresh, try this
rclone rc vfs/refresh recursive=true --fast-list

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Hi Nick,

Thank you for the guide. I really am new to rclone.. So after the cache expires, I need to manually do a refresh so the files will be reflected to my windows? It can not behave something like Docker's bind mount where the volume and host will automatically reflect each other

Hi asdffdsa,

Thank you for welcoming me. The 5 minute cache time duration explains why I need to wait for some time until I hit the refresh button on my windows directory/folder GUI until changes are reflected. So like I have asked Nick, I need to manually do a refresh whether folder GUI or vfs/refresh so the new files will be reflected to my windows?

no, you will not.

this is useful for certain situations.
lets' say that i have a set of folders on a remote in the cloud, storing multimedia.
i make a bunch of changes, upload new media, etc.
now, i need to have my media server, rescan that set of folders.
to speed up the local media server's scanning, i will do the vfs/refresh.
and then i have the media server rescan.

If you have an explorer window open then you'll likely need to refresh it (I think - not 100% sure as I'm not a Windows user), if that is what you mean?

There isn't a mechanism for GCS to tell rclone files have changed, and there isn't a mechanism for rclone mount to tell explorer things have changed (since FUSE file systems don't support inotify or similar).

If you don't want to wait 5 minutes, you can reduce that time, or you can run the vfs/refresh remote control command.

Just would like to inform everyone that I was ablt to fix my concern with adding --dir-cache-time="0" alone like rcloud.exe mount --dir-cache-time="0" remote://storage-bucket/upload/ C://Users/dean/Desktop/upload

I would like to thank you both for your help :slight_smile:

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