rclone/docs/content/commands/rclone_copy.md

title	description	slug	url
rclone copy	Copy files from source to dest, skipping already copied.	rclone_copy	/commands/rclone_copy/

rclone copy

Copy files from source to dest, skipping already copied.

Synopsis

Copy the source to the destination. Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM. Doesn't delete files from the destination.

Note that when the source is a directory, it is always the contents of the directory that is copied, not the directory itself.

For example, given the following command:

rclone copy source:sourcepath dest:destpath

Let's say there are two files in source:

sourcepath/one.txt
sourcepath/two.txt

The command will copy them to:

destpath/one.txt
destpath/two.txt

Not to:

destpath/sourcepath/one.txt
destpath/sourcepath/two.txt

Also note that the destination is always a directory. If the path does not exist, it will be created as a directory and the contents of the source will be copied into it. This is the case even if the source path points to a file. If you want to copy a single file to a different name you must use copyto instead.

For example, given the command:

rclone copy source:sourcepath/one.txt dest:destpath/one.txt

Rclone will create a directory dest:destpath/one.txt and put the source file in there:

dest:destpath/one.txt/one.txt

Not copy the single source file as a file with the given destination path, which would be the result if copyto had been used instead:

dest:destpath/one.txt

If you are familiar with rsync, rclone always works as if you had written a trailing / - meaning "copy the contents of this directory". This applies to all commands and whether you are talking about the source or destination.

See the --no-traverse option for controlling whether rclone lists the destination directory or not. Supplying this option when copying a small number of files into a large destination can speed transfers up greatly.

For example, if you have many files in /path/to/src but only a few of them change every day, you can copy all the files which have changed recently very efficiently like this:

rclone copy --max-age 24h --no-traverse /path/to/src remote:

Note: Use the -P/--progress flag to view real-time transfer statistics.

Note: Use the --dry-run or the --interactive/-i flag to test without copying anything.

rclone copy source:path dest:path [flags]

Options

      --create-empty-src-dirs   Create empty source dirs on destination after copy
  -h, --help                    help for copy

See the global flags page for global options not listed here.

SEE ALSO

• rclone - Show help for rclone commands, flags and backends.