Synching to a cloud remote using multiple Win machine

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

Hi all! I started using Rclone regularly. I have two Win computers (office pc and home pc) that bisync to a Onedrive remote. The bisync jobs start regularly every day using Windows Task Scheduler. The office pc sync job and home pc sync job are scheduled 3h apart, but sometimes the bisync jobs last more and they overlap creating a huge mess. There is a smart strategy to ensure that bisync jobs will never overlap?

Thank you in advance.

Hi G,

This is perhaps off-topic, perhaps a help, and certainly good to know before giving any advice:

Why aren’t you using the native Windows OneDrive client on the two Win computers?

I doubt it, that would require lock-files and that can also create a big mess - I tried it with another sync tool.

I cannot use native Onedrive client because it cannot syncs over network drives and cannot work behind proxy (my office pc has only network drives for data storage and my home pc connects behind a proxy) but with rclone I finally solved these problems.

It would be nice a feature having the lock file on the remote, so that simultaneously sync job by different machine are prevented.

You can always write a script/process around it.

rclone copy a lock file up on the start of your process.
Check if that file exists
Rclone sync/copy - whatever you are doing
rclone delete lock file when done

That is pretty difficult (if not impossible) to do properly.

I have tried several sync tools and haven't seen a robust implementation yet. Part of the reason I switched to rclone was to get rid of the mess I experienced with lock-files and stateful syncs (like bisync).

This will work as long as there are no glitches in network, computer uptime, software etc. etc.

Now what happens if you check and find a lock-file that was created 25 hours ago: Can it be ignored/deleted? Is it an ongoing bisync? Is it a computer that went to sleep during bisync (and will resume on wake)? Is it a crashed sync? Is the state and file system consistent? What to do?

I think it's a good idea. I think that rclone should create the lock file on the remote, so that any pc can check it before starting the sync job. At the moment rclone creates the lock file in the local .cache folder and therefore other machine cannot check if the lock file exist.

for a lock-file,
might be ablt to use https://rclone.org/filtering/#exclude-directory-based-on-a-file

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