Rclone To Dropbox Sync Copypasta

Setting Up For Transfer

Getting Dropbox to work reliably with this was tricky. To get a connection to stay open for any length of time requires making a Dropbox developer “app” at https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps. The settings needed are:

Permission type: Scoped App
account_info.read
files.metadata.write
files.metadata.read
files.content.write
files.content.read
file_requests.write
file_requests.read

Then Rclone has to be set up.

I fussed with settings for quite a while. The settings I’m using are slow and steady. I have synced around 400 GB of my archive with this so far, and it took 6-7 days (IIRC?).

My CLI command at the moment is:

rclone sync "F:\" dropbox: `
--exclude-from "D:\utilities\rclone\exclude-list.txt" `
--size-only `
--fast-list `
--transfers 8 `
--checkers 16 `
--tpslimit 12 `
--tpslimit-burst 0 `
--dropbox-batch-mode async `
--dropbox-batch-size 1000 `
--verbose

The exclude file is to prevent syncing of garbage OS files and other system junk.

# Windows System Junk
$RECYCLE.BIN/**
System Volume Information/**
desktop.ini
thumbs.db
ehthumbs.db

# macOS System Junk
.DS_Store
._*
.Spotlight-V100/**
.Trashes/**

# Linux System Junk
lost+found/**

# Dropbox App Junk
.dropbox.device
.dropbox.cache/**

# Common App/Temp Junk
*.tmp
*.bak