A swift and easy way to sync your files and folders to Google Drive on Rocky Linux can be done using Rclone. Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage. It is a feature-rich alternative to cloud vendors’ web storage interfaces. Over 70 cloud storage products support Rclone including S3 object stores, business & consumer file storage services, and standard transfer protocols.
It’s available from the Epel repository. Do the following steps to clone your files and folders using Rclone
1. Download the EPEL repo
dnf install epel-release
2. Download the Rclone
dnf install rclone
3. To check the version you are running. As you can see I’m running version 1.57.0-DEV on Rocky 9.3
rclone version
4. To start configuring your Rclone. This prompts you to choose several options.
As you can see, I chose, N, A name, then 16, Default, Default, 1,
rclone config
5. The root folder ID is very simple to determine. Go to your drive.google.com. Drag and drop a folder there. Get into the folder and look at the URL, which looks like something this
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/xxxxxxxxxyyyyyyyyyyzzzzzzz
That combination of numbers and Aphabets is at the end of your root folder.
6. Once you enter the root_folder_id, choose default, and it’s gonna prompt you to open a link on your browser.
7. However, if you are on a server with no GUI, you cannot have a browser open, you can easily SSH Tunnel to redirect the headless box port 53682 to the local machine by using the following command. Do that on another terminal. Don’t close this one.
ssh -L localhost:53682:localhost:53682 root@<IP address of your server>
8. The next step is to navigate on your browser to authorize the Rclone
9. And now it’s pretty straightforward to sync your data to Google Drive
rclone sync -v /home/data-backup tunnelix:tunnelix-backup
Note: This method is just an idea of how to make it work and get a basic idea of functionality. However, It’s not properly secured. And more enhancement in the configuration needs to be done. In the future, I’ll write some security enhancements about it.
