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Tutorial: how to install Rclone and configure

Rclone Browser on your Mac [Rclone GUI for
MacOS]
Road To Petabyte 1 day ago · 9 min read

Rclone is a command line program and a basic tool that every Datahoarder should
install on the Mac. Why? Because in such way you can transfer / sync / backup data
from your Mac to di?erent cloud storage (Google Photos, Google Drive, Backblaze
B2, G Suite / Google One / Workspace, Dropbox, Mega NZ, Amazon S3, Amazon
Drive, WebDAV cloud services for example like Icedrive or FilesFM or 1&1 or
Magenta, pCloud, Jottacloud, Koofr, Yandex Disk, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and
many more) or even between cloud storage.

This is the first tutorial “DataHoarding for dummies”. I will post more tutorials and
datahoarding tools for MacOS in future (just thinking that i’m using more than 20+
YouTube Downloaders xD)
I remember I got the same identical problems once I started my datahoarding
activity few years ago, having so many di_culties to understand what I need to write
or how i need to do that. Here why i want to share this tutorial with you.

Step 1: Launch Terminal

You can launch Terminal using Spotlight, Alfred, Finder, Launchpad, etc. Or you can
right click on the Finder icon on the Dock

Then you choose “Go to folder…” and you write

/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

Step 2: Install Rclone

To install Rclone you can visit the o_cial webpage, or you can simply follow these
steps.

2a) Write this in Terminal (Download the latest version of rclone):

cd && curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

2b) Continue by writing this in Terminal (Unzip the download and cd to the
extracted folder):

unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip && cd rclone-*-osx-amd64

2c) Now you need to write two commands (to move rclone to your $PATH)

2d) First write this in Terminal

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

You need to insert your password

2e) Now write the second part in Terminal

sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

2f) Last step: remove the leftover Ales by writing

cd .. && rm -rf rclone-*-osx-amd64 rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

In case you get an error, try to copy the same command you jnd it on the o_cial
page. You can use Homebrew (brew install rclone) too, if you already own
Homebrew, otherwise it requires a bit to install it… See more details below.

Well done! Rclone is now installed. You can access it by using

rclone conjg

Step 3: Add a cloud storage to Rclone

3a) Write

in Terminal
and choose a name for the cloud storage, like “gsuite” or “gdrive”

3b) You get a list of available cloud storage. Choose 13 for Google Drive, 14 for
Google Photos, 9 for Dropbox, 5 for Backblaze B2, 23 for Microsoft OneDrive, 34 for
Webdav, 17 for Jottacloud, 18 for Koofr, 21 for Mega, 26 for pCloud, or check the
full list:
1 / 1Fichier
2 / Alias for an existing remote
3 / Amazon Drive
4 / Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Provider (AWS, Alibaba, Ceph, Digital Ocean,
Dreamhost, IBM COS, Minio, Scaleway, StackPath, Tencent COS, Wasabi) //PS:
COS = Cloud Object Storage
5 / Backblaze B2
6 / Box
7 / Cache a remote
8 / Citrix Sharejle
9 / Dropbox
10 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
11 / FTP Connection
12 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
13 / Google Drive
14 / Google Photos
15 / Hubic (no more available)
16 / In memory object storage system.
17 / Jottacloud
18 / Koofr
19 / Local Disk
20 / Mail.ru Cloud
21 / Mega
22 / Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
23 / Microsoft OneDrive
24 / OpenDrive
25 / OpenStack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Object Storage, OVH Object
Storage, Oracle Cloud Storage)
26 / pCloud
27 / Put.io
28 / QingCloud Object Storage
29 / SSH/SFTP Connection
30 / Sugarsync
31 / Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage
32 / Transparently chunk/split large jles
33 / Union merges the contents of several upstream fs
34 / Webdav (Icedrive, FilesFM, 1&1, Magenta, HiDrive, Nextcloud, ownCloud, etc.;
plus other services that are already integrated in Rclone)
35 / Yandex Disk
36 / http Connection
37 / premiumize.me
38 / seajle

3c) After that you get a lot of messages, which you can read the jrst time, and skip it
in future. There are 3 important messages, for all other you can just click Enter
multiple times

3d) First important message: type of access. I generally choose 1

3e) For advanced conjg i generally choose n

3f) Then i choose y for auto conjguration

3g) Now you need to login to Google and approve Rclone

Once you compile the di?erent steps you get such message. You can close Safari and
activate Terminal again

3h) Now you need to choose if you want team drive or not. I generally choose n
3i) After that you need to choose y and then q to quit it

Your cloud storage is now connected to Rclone

Step 4: configure Rclone Browser

First you need to download Rclone Browser and drag drop it to /Applications.

Then you need to launch it, in the same way you launched Terminal too. You can
jnd it under /Applications/Rclone Browser.app

You maybe get such message

In this case i suggest you to write this in terminal (to allow all apps in MacOS):

sudo spctl --master-disable

Generally you see such setting in Apple Security Panel

Once you write such command in terminal (and you need to conjrm it by entering
your password)

you see it in that way:

Now you can relaunch Rclone Browser without getting any message. If you don’t
want such option, you can simply click “Open Anyway” (you see such message at the
bottom, always under Security). You can still change your setting to “App Store and
identijed developers” later.
Once launched, you see such message

Click Ok

Now you can see it in 2 ways; you see it so

where you need to write

/usr/local/bin/rclone
After that you see the full list of data. Or you see it in this way:

You need to conjgure the settings by writing

/usr/local/bin/rclone

for rclone location, and

/Users/itunesusa/.con0g/rclone/rclone.conf

for rclone.conf location, by changing “itunesusa” with your username.

After that you can conjrm the setting and start to enjoy rclone.

EDIT: Sorry, i missed the new version at all (created by a di?erent developer). After
installing new version 1.8 i got a crash on my Sierra Mac. Version 1.7 is still
compatible with Sierra. Now i changed the Rclone Browser website with the new
Github. Sorry again, but it worked jne, so i hadn’t really needed a new version
(except for di?erent missing features, which they still haven’t implemented with
version 1.7* too)

*I will test version 1.8 later once i launch my Mojave Mac, but i don’t think they
implemented all what i suggested them years ago.

The steps still remain the same, and new version seems identical, there are just some
more options.

Here a comparison between old version UI (top or left) and new version UI (bottom
or right)
They added an useful feature “Save Task”, to rerun rules later (or you can simply
copy the code and paste it in Terminal, but doesn’t work in the last months, worked
jne until few months ago)

They removed some features too. I sent now my suggestions i made few years ago to
the new dev, in the hope they will implement it.
Alternative way
You can use
brew install rclone
by installing Homebrew (a manager able to install di?erent packages) with
/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

So jrst install Homebrew with Terminal, then Rclone.

This steps requires some minutes, because you need to install Xcode Command Line
Tools
You can use this website to jnd other commands too or check Homebrew list.

Do you have a Mac with Apple CPU? Check this or this or this

If you get errors

Please retry step 2a — 2f, maybe using directly the commands you see on the Rclone
Website if you see any errors. So you can avoid errors generated by Medium.

PS: This was the jrst time ever i got an error with rclone.conf (you can see a
terminal message too). Never got it with all other installation i made before (at least
50x). To be sure i repeat the steps using the commands on the original webpage,
instead of using what i wrote in Medium (because Medium sometimes changes
characters). At the end i’m still able to use Rclone and Rclone Browser without
problems.
If you still gets problem, you can try to ask help on r/rclone/

Written by r/appledatahoarding/

Road to Petabyte: For Datahoarders from Datahoarders

Backup version of this post here

Storage Business Mac Macos Software

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