I am trying to wrap my head around Rclone and how to get things set up for my situation. I currently have Rclone set-up on a quickbox (https://quickbox.io/knowledge-base/how-to-install-rclone/) which is Rclone/mergerfs setup with gdrive. I have opted for encryption for this set-up.
Is there anyway I can have Rclone on my local PC, a local Synology NAS (which I'd use an Rclone docker container), and another remote server to be able to connect to the gdrive and access the files encrypted by the quickbox set-up? I would like to be able to sync or copy these files to my local systems, and also upload (especially from the other server) to these same gmedia folders set up in the initial quickbox Rclone install.
I know this is probably an obvious question, but i just can't seem to wrap my head around things.
quickbox is some sort of online server? (the website is down so I can't really check).
In any case, it sounds like you should just be able to use the same config on all machines. As long as they connect to the same gdrive and use a crypt remote with the same crypt key - the data will be readable for all. You probably need to re-authorize on each new setup though, assuming you use the default Oauth authorization system. (if you don't know what that is - this is probably what you use).
The only thing you might want to be aware about if many sources write to the disk - is that concurrent writes to the same files and folders from different sources can result in duplicate files. If this is likely to happen you might consider having a unique upload folder for each where you can drop off the files and just move them into place afterwards.
Or - you can use rclone dedupe remotename: to fix and clean up any duplicates that may occur, as needed.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, quickbox is just basically a seedbox installer script for my Hetzner server. I have the debian based version. Ah, okay, so I think I am starting to get it now - so each remote has to connect to the gdrive - and be auth'd. Now, with the quickbox rclone install it uses mergerfs (so your applications such as radarr have access to your media straight away) and everything is uploaded to gdrive at 3am each night. Would i need to set up mergerfs on each remote?
Just duplicating the setup for each client is absolutely the easiest and more straight-froward approach. That is going to work well enough for most people and doesn't require a lot of knowledge or planning to do. it's mostly just copying the rclone.conf file over to the new PC and running the authorization step in rclone config again.
The slightly more complicated approach that I would consider the ideal is to centralize the connection for all clients through a single server. What I mean by that is simply that you mount the drive on a server, and then share that drive out to all your clients via a completely normal network share. (samba often a good choice here due to cross-compatibility with Windows).
This has several misc. benefits. You can administer everything in one place. You no longer have to worry about concurrent writes causing duplicates (as one agent is doing all the writing). All your clients don't have to run rclone themselves and indeed need no software at all since they just connect to the network share. Trivially easy to add new devices to the system. Much simpler to share with non-technical users as they won't need to admin rclone themselves. Much more granular control when it comes to sharing spesific files and folders to spesific users. A single unified remote-control and web-GUI for your whole system.
If you only have one or two computers that don't do regular systematic uploads then the first method is perfectly adequate - but if you are a more advanced user that wants more control and easy administration, or the system starts to grow in number of clients, you may want to look at the latter eventually
copying configs to other remotes is all i had to do.