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Rclone 1.36 was released recently, bringing support for SFTP, local symbolic links support, mount improvements, along with many other new features and bug fixes.

For those not familiar with Rclone, this is a cross-platform command line tool for synchronizing files and folders to multiple cloud storages, which supports Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, Amazon Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Yandex Disk, and more.

It can be used to sync files either from your machine or from one cloud storage to another.

As a reminder, Rclone doesn't provide real-time file monitoring, and the synchronization is performed on demand (so you must run it manually or using a script, etc.)

For more about Rclone, check out our initial article.

Important changes in Rclone 1.36 include:
  • SFTP remote;
  • re-implement sync routine to work a directory at a time reducing memory usage;
  • logging revamped to be more inline with rsync;
  • implement --backup-dir and --suffix;
  • implement --track-renames;
  • add time-based bandwidth limits;
  • rclone cryptcheck: checks integrity of crypt remotes;
  • allow all config file variables and options to be set from environment variables;
  • add --buffer-size parameter to control buffer size for copy;
  • comply with XDG Base Directory specification (this moves the default location of the config file in a backwards compatible way);
  • MIPS/Linux big and little endian support;
  • local:
    • implement -L, --copy-links flag to allow rclone to follow symlinks;
    • open files in write only mode so rclone can write to an rclone mount;
  • mount:
    • implement proper directory handling (mkdir, rmdir, renaming);
    • make include and exclude filters apply to mount;
    • implement read and write async buffers - control with --buffer-size;
  • crypt:
    • add --crypt-show-mapping to show encrypted file mapping;
    • fix crypt writer getting stuck in a loop (this bug had the potential to cause data corruption when reading data from a network based remote and writing to a crypt on Google Drive).

For a complete changelog, see THIS page.

To use Rclone with a graphical user interface, you may want to check out RcloneBrowser (WebUpd8 provides an Ubuntu PPA for RcloneBrowser so you can easily installing updates).


Download Rclone



(binaries available for Linux: 32bit, 64bit, arm, arm64 and mips big and little endian, Windows :32bit and 64bit, MacOS: 32bit and 64bit, FreeBSD: 32bit, 64bit and arm, and more)

In Linux distributions that support snap packages (Ubuntu and many others), you can install rclone using the following command:
sudo snap install rclone --classic

If you already had Rclone installed using a snap, it should already be up to date (this depends on the snapd version you're using). Alternatively, you can update it using the following command:
sudo snap refresh rclone --classic

For how to use Rclone, you may want to check out its documentation.

Important: if you use the Rclone snap package, you won't be able to mount any cloud storage (bug report). When attempting to mount Google Drive, Dropbox, etc., you'll get an error similar to the following:
Fatal error: failed to mount FUSE fs: fusermount: exec: "fusermount": executable file not found in $PATH
The solution, at least for now, use the Rclone binary downloaded from its website.

To download the source, report bugs, etc., see the Rclone GitHub page.