# rclone

95 Hacker News commenters recommended rclone and 13 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 3 years (3 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** A fast, free command-line tool for copying, syncing, mounting and encrypting data across almost any cloud provider, though rate limits, slow back-off and fiddly setup frustrate some.

## Why people recommend it

- Works with many cloud providers (7 comments): "Rclone has a Google Photos backend and an S3 backend. I haven't used it but assumed you could simply copy from Google Photos into S3." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841298)) "you can just use any cloud blob storage provider (including the big ones) along with the rclone utility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48284167)) "rclone usually works much better for all those cloud storages with terrible UIs/native clients" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47711628))
- Easy cloud backups and data copies (7 comments): "use rclone as a very efficient, rsync-like tool to backup your cloud storage. That's what I do." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765278)) "Just set up Rclone/restic and get your stuff into a system with some immutability." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091094)) "run rclone via crontab to ensure you can still access data even if you get banned" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508142))
- Fast parallel, resumable transfers (5 comments): "rclone lets you do multipart concurrent uploads and downloads to sftp which means you can have multiple streams operating at 200 Mbit/s which helps" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290877)) "RClone is doing the heavy lifting of reliable & fast cloud to cloud transfer" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336995)) "It can also do parallel jobs and is restartable on any failed partial copy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49414863))
- Built-in encryption for cloud storage (2 comments): "Rclone has a built in crypt library that can encrypt your data and store it in a cloud provider." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073146)) "I use file-based remote to keep some repos encrypted on S3 using Rclone." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323829))

## What people warn about

- Provider rate limits and slow back-off (3 comments): "It doesn't honor dropbox's retry-after header and just adds an exponential back off that, in my migrations, has resulted in a pause of days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857486)) "many of the providers it supports has such low ratelimits, that it's fairly difficult to use it to transfer much data at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857256)) "The exponential back off will end up making hours and days long delays that will screw a migration." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857731))
- Fiddly setup, not beginner-friendly (3 comments): "Rclone setup was a nuisance, accumulated a lot of arguments to get latency down" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372612)) "Sure, today you can use rclone. BUT that's not a tool my grandma can use." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857844)) "will happily overwrite/delete your files if you mess up the argument order" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46495061))
- Mounting is experimental and fragile (2 comments): "it is experimental and perhaps the most fragile part of rclone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46170162)) "it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47490507))
- Limited photo service support (2 comments): "I believe that rclone has no support for iCloud photos at this time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46580637)) "From March 31, 2025 rclone can only download photos it uploaded" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46841505))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [rsync](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rsync.md): 157 recommend
- [openrsync](https://hackerapproved.com/p/openrsync.md): 17 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "rclone", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rclone/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).