Skip to content

Rclone and Swestore

A powerful complement to the ARC Clients is the rclone tool. This is a command line tool that support tranferring files from a multitude of storage resources and protocols. It is somewhat a "swiss army knife of cloud storage".

Rclone can help with the following tasks (from the manual page):

  • Backup (and encrypt) files to cloud storage
  • Restore (and decrypt) files from cloud storage
  • Mirror cloud data to other cloud services or locally

Configure Rclone

To be able to use rclone with Swestore is has to be configured. A special command rclone config can be used to create this configuration for us:

$ rclone config1. n for New remote
2. swestore for name
3. webdav for Storage (or the corresponding number in the list)
4. https://webdav.swestore.se for url
5. other for vendor (or the corresponding number in the list)
6. Just press <Enter> for user (ie. leave blank)
7. n for No leave this optional password blank
8. Just press <Enter> for bearer_token
9. n for Edit advanced config?
10. y if you think the resulting config is correct, otherwise e to edit again.
11. q to Quit config

The recommended way of using rclone with swestore is using certificates and a proxy certificate. Using command line option the certificate locations can be specified in the call to rclone:

$ rclone --client-cert=/tmp/x509up_uXXX --client-key=/tmp/x509up_uXXX

This is a bit cumbersome everytime you want to access the rclone-command. To fix this a command line alias can be created:

$ echo 'alias rclone-cert="rclone --client-cert=/tmp/x509up_u${UID} --client-key=/tmp/x509up_u${UID}"' >> ~/.bashrc

Instead of the long command we can now use the shorter command rclone-cert, which we will use in the following examples.

Listing directories and files

Listing directories can be done using the rclone-cert lsd command:

$ rclone-cert lsd swestore:/snic/storage-training
          -1 2022-02-14 16:44:22        -1 Course
          -1 2022-03-14 22:08:12        -1 newdir

Files can be listed using 

$ rclone-cert ls swestore:/snic/storage-training
   116876 Course/apply_storage1.png
   131456 Course/apply_storage2.png
   139240 Course/apply_storage3.png
   152858 Course/apply_storage4.png
    89300 Course/apply_storage5.png

Copying files

Copying a single file can be done using the following command:

$ rclone-cert copyto IMG_E0868.JPG swestore:/snic/storage-training/IMG_E0868.JPG

Recursive copying:

$ rclone-cert copy /home/bmjl/Courses/storage-training/examples swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples

Recursive copying with progress status:

rclone-cert copy -P /home/bmjl/Courses/storage-training/examples swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples
Transferred:      338.249 MiB / 1.894 GiB, 17%, 52.625 MiB/s, ETA 30s
Transferred:           75 / 407, 18%
Elapsed time:         6.5s
Transferring:
 *                          runsten/DJI_0051.JPG: 33% /4.505Mi, 0/s, -
 *                          runsten/DJI_0052.JPG:  6% /4.658Mi, 0/s, -
 *                          runsten/DJI_0053.JPG: 17% /4.747Mi, 0/s, -
 *                          runsten/DJI_0054.JPG:  7% /4.808Mi, 0/s, -

File operations

Creating a directory:

$ rclone-cert mkdir swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples/new_dir

Removing a file:

$ rclone-cert deletefile swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples/test.txt

Removing a directory:

$ rclone-cert rmdir swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples/new_dir/

Removing all files in a directory:

$ rclone-cert delete swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples/
Removing all empty directories:

$ rclone-cert delete swestore:/snic/storage-training/examples/