RClone - Dropbox

Dropbox

Paths are specified as remote:path

Dropbox paths may be as deep as required, eg remote:directory/subdirectory.

The initial setup for dropbox involves getting a token from Dropbox which you need to do in your browser. rclone config walks you through it.

Setup

Here is an example of how to make a remote called remote. First run:

rclone config

This will guide you through an interactive setup process:

n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config
e/n/d/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Cloud Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 6 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 7 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 8 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
 9 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
10 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
11 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex"
Storage> 4
Dropbox App Key - leave blank normally.
app_key> 
Dropbox App Secret - leave blank normally.
app_secret> 
Remote config
Please visit:
https://www.dropbox.com/1/oauth2/authorize?client_id=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX&response_type=code
Enter the code: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_XXXXXXXXXX
--------------------
[remote]
app_key = 
app_secret = 
token = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y

Usage

You can then use it like this:

List directories in top level of your Dropbox:

rclone lsd remote:

List all the files in your dropbox

rclone ls remote:

To copy a local directory to a Dropbox directory called backup:

rclone copy /home/source remote:backup

Modified time and MD5SUMs

Dropbox doesn’t provide the ability to set modification times in the V1 public API, so rclone can’t support modified time with Dropbox.

This may change in the future - see these issues for details:

• Dropbox V2 API
• Allow syncs for remotes that can’t set modtime on existing objects

Dropbox doesn’t return any sort of checksum (MD5 or SHA1).

Together that means that syncs to dropbox will effectively have the --size-only flag set.

Specific Options

Here are the command line options specific to this cloud storage system.

–dropbox-chunk-size=SIZE

Upload chunk size. Max 150M. The default is 128MB. Note that this isn’t buffered into memory.

Limitations

Note that Dropbox is case insensitive so you can’t have a file called “Hello.doc” and one called “hello.doc”.

There are some file names such as thumbs.db which Dropbox can’t store. There is a full list of them in the “Ignored Files” section of this document. Rclone will issue an error message File name disallowed - not uploading if it attempt to upload one of those file names, but the sync won’t fail.

If you have more than 10,000 files in a directory then rclone purge dropbox:dir will return the error Failed to purge: There are too many files involved in this operation. As a work-around do an rclone delete dropbix:dir followed by an rclone rmdir dropbox:dir.