430 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
430 lines
22 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
title: "Overview of cloud storage systems"
|
|
description: "Overview of cloud storage systems"
|
|
type: page
|
|
date: "2019-02-25"
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
# Overview of cloud storage systems #
|
|
|
|
Each cloud storage system is slightly different. Rclone attempts to
|
|
provide a unified interface to them, but some underlying differences
|
|
show through.
|
|
|
|
## Features ##
|
|
|
|
Here is an overview of the major features of each cloud storage system.
|
|
|
|
| Name | Hash | ModTime | Case Insensitive | Duplicate Files | MIME Type |
|
|
| ---------------------------- |:-----------:|:-------:|:----------------:|:---------------:|:---------:|
|
|
| 1Fichier | Whirlpool | No | No | Yes | R |
|
|
| Amazon Drive | MD5 | No | Yes | No | R |
|
|
| Amazon S3 | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Backblaze B2 | SHA1 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Box | SHA1 | Yes | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| Citrix ShareFile | MD5 | Yes | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| Dropbox | DBHASH † | Yes | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| FTP | - | No | No | No | - |
|
|
| Google Cloud Storage | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Google Drive | MD5 | Yes | No | Yes | R/W |
|
|
| Google Photos | - | No | No | Yes | R |
|
|
| HTTP | - | No | No | No | R |
|
|
| Hubic | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Jottacloud | MD5 | Yes | Yes | No | R/W |
|
|
| Koofr | MD5 | No | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| Mail.ru Cloud | Mailru ‡‡‡ | Yes | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| Mega | - | No | No | Yes | - |
|
|
| Memory | MD5 | Yes | No | No | - |
|
|
| Microsoft Azure Blob Storage | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Microsoft OneDrive | SHA1 ‡‡ | Yes | Yes | No | R |
|
|
| OpenDrive | MD5 | Yes | Yes | No | - |
|
|
| Openstack Swift | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| pCloud | MD5, SHA1 | Yes | No | No | W |
|
|
| premiumize.me | - | No | Yes | No | R |
|
|
| put.io | CRC-32 | Yes | No | Yes | R |
|
|
| QingStor | MD5 | No | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| Seafile | - | No | No | No | - |
|
|
| SFTP | MD5, SHA1 ‡ | Yes | Depends | No | - |
|
|
| SugarSync | - | No | No | No | - |
|
|
| Tardigrade | - | Yes | No | No | - |
|
|
| WebDAV | MD5, SHA1 ††| Yes ††† | Depends | No | - |
|
|
| Yandex Disk | MD5 | Yes | No | No | R/W |
|
|
| The local filesystem | All | Yes | Depends | No | - |
|
|
|
|
### Hash ###
|
|
|
|
The cloud storage system supports various hash types of the objects.
|
|
The hashes are used when transferring data as an integrity check and
|
|
can be specifically used with the `--checksum` flag in syncs and in
|
|
the `check` command.
|
|
|
|
To use the verify checksums when transferring between cloud storage
|
|
systems they must support a common hash type.
|
|
|
|
† Note that Dropbox supports [its own custom
|
|
hash](https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/content-hash).
|
|
This is an SHA256 sum of all the 4MB block SHA256s.
|
|
|
|
‡ SFTP supports checksums if the same login has shell access and `md5sum`
|
|
or `sha1sum` as well as `echo` are in the remote's PATH.
|
|
|
|
†† WebDAV supports hashes when used with Owncloud and Nextcloud only.
|
|
|
|
††† WebDAV supports modtimes when used with Owncloud and Nextcloud only.
|
|
|
|
‡‡ Microsoft OneDrive Personal supports SHA1 hashes, whereas OneDrive
|
|
for business and SharePoint server support Microsoft's own
|
|
[QuickXorHash](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/developer/code-snippets/quickxorhash).
|
|
|
|
‡‡‡ Mail.ru uses its own modified SHA1 hash
|
|
|
|
### ModTime ###
|
|
|
|
The cloud storage system supports setting modification times on
|
|
objects. If it does then this enables a using the modification times
|
|
as part of the sync. If not then only the size will be checked by
|
|
default, though the MD5SUM can be checked with the `--checksum` flag.
|
|
|
|
All cloud storage systems support some kind of date on the object and
|
|
these will be set when transferring from the cloud storage system.
|
|
|
|
### Case Insensitive ###
|
|
|
|
If a cloud storage systems is case sensitive then it is possible to
|
|
have two files which differ only in case, eg `file.txt` and
|
|
`FILE.txt`. If a cloud storage system is case insensitive then that
|
|
isn't possible.
|
|
|
|
This can cause problems when syncing between a case insensitive
|
|
system and a case sensitive system. The symptom of this is that no
|
|
matter how many times you run the sync it never completes fully.
|
|
|
|
The local filesystem and SFTP may or may not be case sensitive
|
|
depending on OS.
|
|
|
|
* Windows - usually case insensitive, though case is preserved
|
|
* OSX - usually case insensitive, though it is possible to format case sensitive
|
|
* Linux - usually case sensitive, but there are case insensitive file systems (eg FAT formatted USB keys)
|
|
|
|
Most of the time this doesn't cause any problems as people tend to
|
|
avoid files whose name differs only by case even on case sensitive
|
|
systems.
|
|
|
|
### Duplicate files ###
|
|
|
|
If a cloud storage system allows duplicate files then it can have two
|
|
objects with the same name.
|
|
|
|
This confuses rclone greatly when syncing - use the `rclone dedupe`
|
|
command to rename or remove duplicates.
|
|
|
|
### Restricted filenames ###
|
|
|
|
Some cloud storage systems might have restrictions on the characters
|
|
that are usable in file or directory names.
|
|
When `rclone` detects such a name during a file upload, it will
|
|
transparently replace the restricted characters with similar looking
|
|
Unicode characters.
|
|
|
|
This process is designed to avoid ambiguous file names as much as
|
|
possible and allow to move files between many cloud storage systems
|
|
transparently.
|
|
|
|
The name shown by `rclone` to the user or during log output will only
|
|
contain a minimal set of [replaced characters](#restricted-characters)
|
|
to ensure correct formatting and not necessarily the actual name used
|
|
on the cloud storage.
|
|
|
|
This transformation is reversed when downloading a file or parsing
|
|
`rclone` arguments.
|
|
For example, when uploading a file named `my file?.txt` to Onedrive
|
|
will be displayed as `my file?.txt` on the console, but stored as
|
|
`my file？.txt` (the `?` gets replaced by the similar looking `？`
|
|
character) to Onedrive.
|
|
The reverse transformation allows to read a file`unusual/name.txt`
|
|
from Google Drive, by passing the name `unusual／name.txt` (the `/` needs
|
|
to be replaced by the similar looking `／` character) on the command line.
|
|
|
|
#### Default restricted characters {#restricted-characters}
|
|
|
|
The table below shows the characters that are replaced by default.
|
|
|
|
When a replacement character is found in a filename, this character
|
|
will be escaped with the `‛` character to avoid ambiguous file names.
|
|
(e.g. a file named `␀.txt` would shown as `‛␀.txt`)
|
|
|
|
Each cloud storage backend can use a different set of characters,
|
|
which will be specified in the documentation for each backend.
|
|
|
|
| Character | Value | Replacement |
|
|
| --------- |:-----:|:-----------:|
|
|
| NUL | 0x00 | ␀ |
|
|
| SOH | 0x01 | ␁ |
|
|
| STX | 0x02 | ␂ |
|
|
| ETX | 0x03 | ␃ |
|
|
| EOT | 0x04 | ␄ |
|
|
| ENQ | 0x05 | ␅ |
|
|
| ACK | 0x06 | ␆ |
|
|
| BEL | 0x07 | ␇ |
|
|
| BS | 0x08 | ␈ |
|
|
| HT | 0x09 | ␉ |
|
|
| LF | 0x0A | ␊ |
|
|
| VT | 0x0B | ␋ |
|
|
| FF | 0x0C | ␌ |
|
|
| CR | 0x0D | ␍ |
|
|
| SO | 0x0E | ␎ |
|
|
| SI | 0x0F | ␏ |
|
|
| DLE | 0x10 | ␐ |
|
|
| DC1 | 0x11 | ␑ |
|
|
| DC2 | 0x12 | ␒ |
|
|
| DC3 | 0x13 | ␓ |
|
|
| DC4 | 0x14 | ␔ |
|
|
| NAK | 0x15 | ␕ |
|
|
| SYN | 0x16 | ␖ |
|
|
| ETB | 0x17 | ␗ |
|
|
| CAN | 0x18 | ␘ |
|
|
| EM | 0x19 | ␙ |
|
|
| SUB | 0x1A | ␚ |
|
|
| ESC | 0x1B | ␛ |
|
|
| FS | 0x1C | ␜ |
|
|
| GS | 0x1D | ␝ |
|
|
| RS | 0x1E | ␞ |
|
|
| US | 0x1F | ␟ |
|
|
| / | 0x2F | ／ |
|
|
| DEL | 0x7F | ␡ |
|
|
|
|
The default encoding will also encode these file names as they are
|
|
problematic with many cloud storage systems.
|
|
|
|
| File name | Replacement |
|
|
| --------- |:-----------:|
|
|
| . | ． |
|
|
| .. | ．． |
|
|
|
|
#### Invalid UTF-8 bytes {#invalid-utf8}
|
|
|
|
Some backends only support a sequence of well formed UTF-8 bytes
|
|
as file or directory names.
|
|
|
|
In this case all invalid UTF-8 bytes will be replaced with a quoted
|
|
representation of the byte value to allow uploading a file to such a
|
|
backend. For example, the invalid byte `0xFE` will be encoded as `‛FE`.
|
|
|
|
A common source of invalid UTF-8 bytes are local filesystems, that store
|
|
names in a different encoding than UTF-8 or UTF-16, like latin1. See the
|
|
[local filenames](/local/#filenames) section for details.
|
|
|
|
#### Encoding option {#encoding}
|
|
|
|
Most backends have an encoding options, specified as a flag
|
|
`--backend-encoding` where `backend` is the name of the backend, or as
|
|
a config parameter `encoding` (you'll need to select the Advanced
|
|
config in `rclone config` to see it).
|
|
|
|
This will have default value which encodes and decodes characters in
|
|
such a way as to preserve the maximum number of characters (see
|
|
above).
|
|
|
|
However this can be incorrect in some scenarios, for example if you
|
|
have a Windows file system with characters such as `＊` and `？` that
|
|
you want to remain as those characters on the remote rather than being
|
|
translated to `*` and `?`.
|
|
|
|
The `--backend-encoding` flags allow you to change that. You can
|
|
disable the encoding completely with `--backend-encoding None` or set
|
|
`encoding = None` in the config file.
|
|
|
|
Encoding takes a comma separated list of encodings. You can see the
|
|
list of all available characters by passing an invalid value to this
|
|
flag, eg `--local-encoding "help"` and `rclone help flags encoding`
|
|
will show you the defaults for the backends.
|
|
|
|
| Encoding | Characters |
|
|
| --------- | ---------- |
|
|
| Asterisk | `*` |
|
|
| BackQuote | `` ` `` |
|
|
| BackSlash | `\` |
|
|
| Colon | `:` |
|
|
| CrLf | CR 0x0D, LF 0x0A |
|
|
| Ctl | All control characters 0x00-0x1F |
|
|
| Del | DEL 0x7F |
|
|
| Dollar | `$` |
|
|
| Dot | `.` |
|
|
| DoubleQuote | `"` |
|
|
| Hash | `#` |
|
|
| InvalidUtf8 | An invalid UTF-8 character (eg latin1) |
|
|
| LeftCrLfHtVt | CR 0x0D, LF 0x0A,HT 0x09, VT 0x0B on the left of a string |
|
|
| LeftPeriod | `.` on the left of a string |
|
|
| LeftSpace | SPACE on the left of a string |
|
|
| LeftTilde | `~` on the left of a string |
|
|
| LtGt | `<`, `>` |
|
|
| None | No characters are encoded |
|
|
| Percent | `%` |
|
|
| Pipe | <code>\|</code> |
|
|
| Question | `?` |
|
|
| RightCrLfHtVt | CR 0x0D, LF 0x0A, HT 0x09, VT 0x0B on the right of a string |
|
|
| RightPeriod | `.` on the right of a string |
|
|
| RightSpace | SPACE on the right of a string |
|
|
| SingleQuote | `'` |
|
|
| Slash | `/` |
|
|
|
|
To take a specific example, the FTP backend's default encoding is
|
|
|
|
--ftp-encoding "Slash,Del,Ctl,RightSpace,Dot"
|
|
|
|
However, let's say the FTP server is running on Windows and can't have
|
|
any of the invalid Windows characters in file names. You are backing
|
|
up Linux servers to this FTP server which do have those characters in
|
|
file names. So you would add the Windows set which are
|
|
|
|
Slash,LtGt,DoubleQuote,Colon,Question,Asterisk,Pipe,BackSlash,Ctl,RightSpace,RightPeriod,InvalidUtf8,Dot
|
|
|
|
to the existing ones, giving:
|
|
|
|
Slash,LtGt,DoubleQuote,Colon,Question,Asterisk,Pipe,BackSlash,Ctl,RightSpace,RightPeriod,InvalidUtf8,Dot,Del,RightSpace
|
|
|
|
This can be specified using the `--ftp-encoding` flag or using an `encoding` parameter in the config file.
|
|
|
|
Or let's say you have a Windows server but you want to preserve `＊`
|
|
and `？`, you would then have this as the encoding (the Windows
|
|
encoding minus `Asterisk` and `Question`).
|
|
|
|
Slash,LtGt,DoubleQuote,Colon,Pipe,BackSlash,Ctl,RightSpace,RightPeriod,InvalidUtf8,Dot
|
|
|
|
This can be specified using the `--local-encoding` flag or using an
|
|
`encoding` parameter in the config file.
|
|
|
|
### MIME Type ###
|
|
|
|
MIME types (also known as media types) classify types of documents
|
|
using a simple text classification, eg `text/html` or
|
|
`application/pdf`.
|
|
|
|
Some cloud storage systems support reading (`R`) the MIME type of
|
|
objects and some support writing (`W`) the MIME type of objects.
|
|
|
|
The MIME type can be important if you are serving files directly to
|
|
HTTP from the storage system.
|
|
|
|
If you are copying from a remote which supports reading (`R`) to a
|
|
remote which supports writing (`W`) then rclone will preserve the MIME
|
|
types. Otherwise they will be guessed from the extension, or the
|
|
remote itself may assign the MIME type.
|
|
|
|
## Optional Features ##
|
|
|
|
All the remotes support a basic set of features, but there are some
|
|
optional features supported by some remotes used to make some
|
|
operations more efficient.
|
|
|
|
| Name | Purge | Copy | Move | DirMove | CleanUp | ListR | StreamUpload | LinkSharing | About | EmptyDir |
|
|
| ---------------------------- |:-----:|:----:|:----:|:-------:|:-------:|:-----:|:------------:|:------------:|:-----:| :------: |
|
|
| 1Fichier | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
|
|
| Amazon Drive | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No [#575](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/575) | No | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | Yes |
|
|
| Amazon S3 | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | No |
|
|
| Backblaze B2 | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
|
|
| Box | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No [#575](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/575) | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
|
|
| Citrix ShareFile | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | No | Yes |
|
|
| Dropbox | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No [#575](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/575) | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| FTP | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | Yes |
|
|
| Google Cloud Storage | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | No |
|
|
| Google Drive | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| Google Photos | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No |
|
|
| HTTP | No | No | No | No | No | No | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | Yes |
|
|
| Hubic | Yes † | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | No |
|
|
| Jottacloud | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| Mail.ru Cloud | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| Mega | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| Memory | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
|
|
| Microsoft Azure Blob Storage | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | No |
|
|
| Microsoft OneDrive | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No [#575](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/575) | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| OpenDrive | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
|
|
| Openstack Swift | Yes † | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | No |
|
|
| pCloud | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| premiumize.me | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| put.io | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| QingStor | No | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | No | No |
|
|
| Seafile | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| SFTP | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| SugarSync | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
|
|
| Tardigrade | Yes † | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
|
|
| WebDAV | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes ‡ | No [#2178](https://github.com/rclone/rclone/issues/2178) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| Yandex Disk | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
| The local filesystem | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
|
|
|
|
### Purge ###
|
|
|
|
This deletes a directory quicker than just deleting all the files in
|
|
the directory.
|
|
|
|
† Note Swift, Hubic, and Tardigrade implement this in order to delete
|
|
directory markers but they don't actually have a quicker way of deleting
|
|
files other than deleting them individually.
|
|
|
|
‡ StreamUpload is not supported with Nextcloud
|
|
|
|
### Copy ###
|
|
|
|
Used when copying an object to and from the same remote. This known
|
|
as a server side copy so you can copy a file without downloading it
|
|
and uploading it again. It is used if you use `rclone copy` or
|
|
`rclone move` if the remote doesn't support `Move` directly.
|
|
|
|
If the server doesn't support `Copy` directly then for copy operations
|
|
the file is downloaded then re-uploaded.
|
|
|
|
### Move ###
|
|
|
|
Used when moving/renaming an object on the same remote. This is known
|
|
as a server side move of a file. This is used in `rclone move` if the
|
|
server doesn't support `DirMove`.
|
|
|
|
If the server isn't capable of `Move` then rclone simulates it with
|
|
`Copy` then delete. If the server doesn't support `Copy` then rclone
|
|
will download the file and re-upload it.
|
|
|
|
### DirMove ###
|
|
|
|
This is used to implement `rclone move` to move a directory if
|
|
possible. If it isn't then it will use `Move` on each file (which
|
|
falls back to `Copy` then download and upload - see `Move` section).
|
|
|
|
### CleanUp ###
|
|
|
|
This is used for emptying the trash for a remote by `rclone cleanup`.
|
|
|
|
If the server can't do `CleanUp` then `rclone cleanup` will return an
|
|
error.
|
|
|
|
### ListR ###
|
|
|
|
The remote supports a recursive list to list all the contents beneath
|
|
a directory quickly. This enables the `--fast-list` flag to work.
|
|
See the [rclone docs](/docs/#fast-list) for more details.
|
|
|
|
### StreamUpload ###
|
|
|
|
Some remotes allow files to be uploaded without knowing the file size
|
|
in advance. This allows certain operations to work without spooling the
|
|
file to local disk first, e.g. `rclone rcat`.
|
|
|
|
### LinkSharing ###
|
|
|
|
Sets the necessary permissions on a file or folder and prints a link
|
|
that allows others to access them, even if they don't have an account
|
|
on the particular cloud provider.
|
|
|
|
### About ###
|
|
|
|
This is used to fetch quota information from the remote, like bytes
|
|
used/free/quota and bytes used in the trash.
|
|
|
|
This is also used to return the space used, available for `rclone mount`.
|
|
|
|
If the server can't do `About` then `rclone about` will return an
|
|
error.
|
|
|
|
### EmptyDir ###
|
|
|
|
The remote supports empty directories. See [Limitations](/bugs/#limitations)
|
|
for details. Most Object/Bucket based remotes do not support this.
|