Suggested backend for "rclone serve" to rclone

Help and Support
1

Hi,

I’m using rclone quite a lot for accessing third-party services. But now I’ve decided to use it to move my local photo collection to NAS and keep it mounted.

The question I’m asking is what is the best 'protocol’ to use. My requirements are followed:

  • On server files should be stored as is (exactly same directory layout)
  • Symlinks should be supported (relative symlinks on server should be visible as symlinks on client).
  • mtime should be preserved
  • Authentication is plus but not requires. Encryption is not needed.
  • Access is usually over wifi. And remote access over VPN sometimes
  • Usually files are immutable (I almost never modify huge binary files).
  • There will be only one rclone client.

What options I consider:

  • sftp or SMB (using “native” servers like OpenSSH, samba)
  • rclone serve sftp
  • rclone serve webdav
  • rclone serve s3

I’ve played with rclone server webdav and was able to get desired symlinks behavior. So it’s totally fine. I’m sure that I’ll get same with S3 if needed. sftp looks slowest for me

I’ll access it with --vfs-cache-mode full and big enough timeouts. Also local cache can be as huge as needed (let’s say around half of storage size).

I think that s3 is best choice here.. Are there some significant downsides of any of protocols? Any other suggestions?

2

welcome to the forum,

fwiw, i would not use rclone.
every NAS and every OS has excellent support for SMB/SAMBA

actually, it is the worst choice, as that command is labeled experimental

i have a short howto guide
How to access SMB/SAMBA with rclone

3

I agree that it would be nice to have this. I don’t run rclone on a NAS but I use it to serve my VPS and the mounted dirs there (I could use it to directly serve but this way I get to do a lot with a single server call).

I chose WebDAV behind a Caddy reverse proxy doing the TLS (or whatever). It was much faster than SSH and still encrypted. And does still work with ModTime and some other features.

The biggest thing I would like to get from “rclone serve rclone” would be (a) ListR support and (b) chucked/resumable uploads. Maybe (c) metadata but I am not sure that is different.