Sensible settings to synchronize Nextcloud with VFS support

[antrmn (Antonio Romano)]

The NextCloud official client on Linux does support virtual files in a kind of rudimentary way, by adding a .nextcloud as a suffix on all the files that have not been downloaded yet. The mechanism is not as transparent as the other OSes (Windows, Mac, even Android with SAF!) and I was abandoning the idea of syncing my whole cloud while keeping offline copies of a small subset of selected files, until I figured out that the mount command of rclone has VFS options.

I have read the documentation and tried the following command:

rclone mount hetzner: ~/mymount --vfs-cache-mode full --vfs-cache-max-age 24h0m0s --vfs-cache-poll-interval 5s -v

I noticed a few things:

1. It takes some time (a few minutes) to mark a cached file as stale when a change on mirror occurs. It seems that --poll-interval is unsupported for WebDAV.
2. Opening a folder in Dolphin (KDE's file manager) triggers lots of download, because of file thumbnails
3. There's no way to know if a file has been downloaded, except by looking at the ~/.cache/rclone/ (And that still would not be complete, since AFAICU files can be partially downloaded)

I'd like to know if rclone mount with vfs options is the right tool to get an experience similar the Nextcloud client for Windows, where one can get a quick propagation of changes and selective offline access. If it is possible, what are some useful settings to achieve this?

Thanks in advance

[kapitainsky]

@antrmn

It takes some time (a few minutes) to mark a cached file as stale when a change on mirror occurs. It seems that --poll-interval is unsupported for WebDAV.

webdav is not polling remote so this flag has no effect. By default changes on remote will be populated to the mount in up to 5 min.

@antrmn

Opening a folder in Dolphin (KDE's file manager) triggers lots of download, because of file thumbnails

It downloads whatever Dolphin is asking for. Not sure what is your expectation here.

@antrmn

There's no way to know if a file has been downloaded, except by looking at the ~/.cache/rclone/ (And that still would not be complete, since AFAICU files can be partially downloaded)

This is by design - purpose of caching is not to download all files but only data which is needed. It can be 1GB file and program is only reading first 1KB. Why to download it all?

@antrmn

I'd like to know if rclone mount with vfs options is the right tool to get an experience similar the Nextcloud client for Windows, where one can get a quick propagation of changes and selective offline access. If it is possible, what are some useful settings to achieve this?

No idea what "Nextcloud client for Windows" is but definitely VFS is not for offline access. Again by design.