Working Plexdrive + rclone - want to move to encryption

Hi All,

So I’ve got my ~700gb on Google Drive and working with plex off my VPS (60gb storage) well!

I have rclone (Gdrive + GdriveCache as well as /mnt/Plexdrive as my plexdrive mount point.

Now I want to move to an encrypted setup on google drive for obvious reasons…

However, I have a few questions about how to do this.

  1. Will I have to download and reupload the encrypted versions of all the files?
  2. I read somewhere one can encrypt them directly in google drive through google compute and their 300$ free trial. Anyone tried this?
  3. If all media is stored encrypted on gdrive, do they need to be downloaded and decrypted first before one can begin playing/streaming a file? How does this work?

Thank you very much!

Yes

You can use a GCP instance to do the download, encrypt and upload which will save bandwidth. I haven’t tried this personally though.

No, the media can be streamed. Rclone chunks the file into 64k chunks for the crypto so only 64k need be downloaded before the stream can start playing.

Okay so thanks first of all for the quick answer!

Ah okay, so instead of downloading to my own PC and encrypting there I can download to GCP and encrypt there and then reupload to my gdrive from there.

This is probably going to be much faster to do the encryption on googles hardware (my desktop here at work is not verey powerful), but my connection is pretty decent 100 mbits / 50 mbits - but still probably quicker to transfer all internally in googles infrastructure… I will play around with this to see if I can get it to work. Can you point me to the right location inside google where I would setup such an instance? Thanks!

After I’ve cleared my gdrive of media then, I should reupload it through the encrypted rclone remote, correct?

On the download side, I just mount plexdrive to the same folder as the decrypted rclone, correct?

Well I’d do it on the fly. You’d set up a new remote and just rclone sync oldremote: newremote:

This will temporarily use twice the storage. Or you could rclone move oldremote: newremote: if you don’t want to use twice the storage. (I’d do the copy and then run rclone check oldremote: newremote: but I’m paranoid about data loss!)

Thanks for the tip. I have it all backed up on 2 separate HDDs already (also paranoid here :)) so i can be a bit reckless with this gdrive data haha.

So would you recommend doing the following as well:

  1. create a new encrypted Gdrive remote [GdriveEnc]
  2. run “rclone move Gdrive:/plex GdriveEnc:/plex/enc” ?
    This will create an encrypted copy of everything in /plex/enc on my gdrive, right? This downloads eveyrthing onto my VPS, correct? I only have about 40gb sotrage available. Can I force it to do just like 10-20gb at a time and then delete that to move on to the next set of movies?
  3. delete my orginal, unencrypted media in Gdrive:/plex/movies and Gdrive:/plex/tv
  4. remount my plexdrive to GdriveEnc:/ (?)

Where does my gdrive cache rclone remote fit into all of this? Is the rclone cache remote even worth it? Should I maybe just delete it in the interest of simplicity?

Thanks!

Okay so I’ve dug through the rclone move docs and just to confirm, I’d run the following. right?

rclone move --cache-total-chunk-size=“20G” Gdrive:/plex/* GdriveEnc:/plex_enc/

should I use either --tpslimit or --tpslimitburst to avoid gdrive ban with this action?

I could let this run overnight for example if its going to DL to my VPS, encrypt and reupload correctly.

This will stream stuff, encrypt it then stream it up again, no local disk space needed.

Note I recommend you don’t overlap the paths, so if necessary re-arrange the stuff on your drive into /unencrypted and /encrypted

Not needed if you use rclone move it will do it as it goes along.

Note you can run rclone movemultiple times if it doesn’t complete the run.

You don’t need it for the transfer.

Okay great, thanks so much for clearing all this up. So I will begin this transfer now.

On the other end, the decrypting/playing. How exactly will this work?

Do I have to create another “decrypt” remote to point my plexdrive at?

EDIT:

Ran sudo rclone copy Gdrive:plex/movies GdriveEnc:plex_enc/movies and it seems to be copying… Hasnt spit out any output yet, but I see an encrypted folder was created in my gdrive.

And this is the system load from my netdata instance haha (look at network load):

The crypt remote you’ve created will also decrypt if you read files from it.

:slight_smile:

Ah great, thank you :slight_smile:

Should I “re-point” my plexdrive then directly at the mounted crypt remotes encrypted media folder i.e. “GdriveEnc:plex_enc” ?

Thanks!

P.S. the transfer is going well. It ran for 6 hours over night without failing, got about 2/3 of my library encrypted and copied, and doing the rest this morning!

EDIT: Pointed my plexdrive at the new folder I mountd the rclone crypt at, i.e.

rclone mount --options options GdriveEnc:plex_enc /mnt/Plexdrive_dec
plexdrive mount --options options /mnt/Plexdrive_dec/

In case anyone comes across this thread in future and needs help, the above worked for me :slight_smile:

Does anyone have any tips on options for this setup to increase performance of the rclone/plexdrive mounts with the cache options, etc? Thanks!

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