Silly Question but New to RClone

[luckofthelefty]

I just have a quick question to how rclone is working with google drive. I was able to get it setup as a service and everything is working fine with plex and google drive.

I just have one question. Say the server I'm using has a 500gb hdd but my gdrive exceeds 500gb, when rclone runs as mount, are the files copied over to my server in full? I'm not sure how all this actually works haha.

#service file. Copied from a tutorial online for the most part.

[Unit]
Description=Mount and cache Google drive to /media/Plex
After=syslog.target local-fs.target network.target
[Service]
Environment=RCLONEHOME=/home/luckofthelefty/.config/rclone
Environment=MOUNTTO=/media/Plex
Environment=LOGS=/home/luckofthelefty/logs
Environment=UPLOADS=/home/luckofthelefty/uploads
Type=simple
User=root
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p ${MOUNTTO}
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p ${LOGS}
ExecStartPre=/bin/mkdir -p ${UPLOADS}
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount \
  --rc \
  --log-file ${LOGS}/rclone.log \
  --log-level INFO \
  --umask 022 \
  --allow-non-empty \
  --allow-other \
  --fuse-flag sync_read \
  --tpslimit 10 \
  --tpslimit-burst 10 \
  --dir-cache-time=160h \
  --buffer-size=64M \
  --attr-timeout=1s \
  --vfs-read-chunk-size=2M \
  --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=2G \
  --vfs-cache-max-age=5m \
  --vfs-cache-mode=writes \
  --cache-dir ${UPLOADS} \
  --config ${RCLONEHOME}/rclone.conf \
  Gdrive: ${MOUNTTO}
ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -u -z ${MOUNTTO}
ExecStop=/bin/rmdir ${MOUNTTO}
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Again, really new to all this so I was just wondering how it would work.

Thanks!

[Animosity022]

In general, it's better to just use rclone copy than to copy directly to the drive as things work better.

Not sure where you got that tutorial at but man, it has some flags.

I'd remove:

@luckofthelefty

  --buffer-size=64M \
  --attr-timeout=1s \
  --vfs-read-chunk-size=2M \
  --vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=2G \

and

@luckofthelefty

  --fuse-flag sync_read \
  --tpslimit 10 \
  --tpslimit-burst 10 \

@luckofthelefty

--allow-non-empty \

The way the mount works depends on the cache mode. With vfs-cache-mode writes, it'll write locally to your cache-dir first, upload it immediatley and keep it local for 5 minutes based on the cache-max-age parameter.

I don't normally write to my mount as if it want to copy, I use rclone copy or move.

[PandaExpress]

Whats the benefit of having a file sit in cache-dir first?

[luckofthelefty]

Thanks @Animosity022 for the reply. I'll update my service file with your recommendations. Will I have any issues if the google drive total size exceeds my actual hard drive size?

[Animosity022]

Nope, the size of the drive does not matter as you don't use any hard drive space for your drive.

Based on your settings though, you do have

@luckofthelefty

--vfs-cache-mode=writes \

So items are written locally first and stick around for 5 minutes so that's the only space ever consumed locally.