A Dummies Guide to RClone (rclone?)

Situation: you have to download everything on a Google Drive before a deadline.

Problem #1: when Google Drive zips large folders, it doesn't include all files in them (it's a major wtf but it's true)

Solution #1: rclone

Problem #2: you have no idea how to use rclone and that website is designed for people who know how to use it (it's a major wtf but I believe that's true)

Solution #2: my dummies guide to rclone. 

If that's you, welcome. Let's start.

Installing rclone

I can't actually remember how to do this. Hopefully it's pretty straightforward. If it's not, here's the video I had to watch way too much of to re-learn the very basic things I wanted to do. Only watch the download section because the rest of it will put you wrong.

Using rclone

Rclone is a tool you use through the command line/terminal/powershell interface. What you want to do is go to the folder you installed rclone in and type cmd into the directory bar: this opens the terminal in that folder.

Creating a "Remote" (link to your Google Drive)

The next thing you want to do is set up the link between your machine (where you installed rclone) and your Google Drive (rclone handles lots of other cloud storage services as well). This is actually explained in a reasonably straightforward way by rclone itself. My headline is this: for a general purpose user all you want to do is type this stuff (hit enter each line):

rclone config (to access the menu to create a new link)

n (to create the new link)

main (to create a link named main; obviously you can name it anything... the advice is to make it short; I'd also avoid spaces, slashes etc because computers often hate spaces, slashes etc, but that is a guess)

18 (this is the number that tells rclone you want to make the link to Google Drive)

(press enter)

(press enter)

1 (you'll want as much as possible, I imagine)

(press enter)

n (you're a dummy; you can't do anything advance)

y (this will open a tab in your default browser with a list of all your Google Accounts, choose the one whose drive you're interested in and then accept)

n (unless you want a shared drive)

y (to keep the hard work you've just done)

q (unless you want to set up another link, say to a shared drive)

What if you want to download from a shared drive?

The good news is that it's almost identical in process. For simplicity's sake, I have copied and pasted the above up until the divergence point:

rclone config (to access the menu to create a new link)

n (to create the new link)

shared1 (to create a link named shared1; obviously you can name it anything... the advice is to make it short; I'd also avoid spaces, slashes etc because computers often hate spaces, slashes etc, but that is a guess)

18 (this is the number that tells rclone you want to make the link to Google Drive)

(press enter)

(press enter)

1 (you'll want as much as possible, I imagine)

(press enter)

n (you're a dummy; you can't do anything advance)

y (this will open a tab in your default browser with a list of all your Google Accounts, choose the one whose drive you're interested in and then accept)

y (because we want a shared drive)

1 (I'm not sure how it works if you've only got one shared drive; I have several so I enter the number 1 for the first one, 2 for the second one and so forth)

y (to keep your hard work)

q (unless you want to do another drive)

Doing the Downloading

The basic tool here is "copy". Warning: it doesn't download duplicate files. Alas, if you go to rclone's copy help page on its website what you get is basically:

rclone copy source:sourcepath dest:destpath

That is not very helpful, right?

What you want to do is this:

rclone copy main: C:\Users\heast\Downloads\SharedDrives -P

• "main:" identifies the link (remote/drive) that I want to copy from. 
• "C:\..." identifies the folder I want to send the copied files to
• -P tells rclone to give me a constantly updating progress bar

And that's it! All you have to do is wait. It's actually pretty bloody quick so it shouldn't take too long.

Warning: if your folder has a space in its name, rclone will throw a hissy fit. That's why I've called my folder SharedDrives not Shared Drives. Obviously you can just rename the folder how you want after rclone's finished.

Doing Literally Anything Else

I believe you now know enough about how to use rclone that you can make sense of the documentation pages on rclone's website for the various functionalities it provides.