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rclone to cloud storage: what a nightly sync costs at each vendor, and the flags that cut it

Prices checked · rclone 1.75.2 documentation read

For 1 TB of files synced every night with rclone, OVHcloud Object Storage Infrequent Access costs least: $52.78 a year with one full restore, that is $4.06 a normal month and $8.12 the month you bring everything back. Its uploads, listings and reads cost nothing, so rclone's flags do not change its bill. They do at 5 of the 18 vendors, where rclone's defaults add as much as $10.38 a month (Google Cloud Storage Nearline).

rclone's defaults read every file's date, every night. On its s3 backend, rclone keeps a file's modification time in the object's metadata, "which unfortunately takes an extra HEAD request to read which can be expensive (in time and money)". With 250,000 files that is 7,500,000 reads a month, on top of 300,000 folder listings. Add --fast-list --checksum and a run lists 1,000 objects a request and reads no dates: 7,500 listings a month. The price is on your side: --checksum works out the MD5 of every local file, "which, if it is a local disk, will cause lots of disk activity". rclone, Reducing costs

Every vendor for a nightly rclone sync, cheapest year first

One row per vendor: its cheapest class you can read back at once, ranked on rclone's defaults, 11 normal months and the month you restore all 1 TB. The next column is the same class with --fast-list --checksum.

#Offer, and where it keeps the filesYear with one restoreNormal month, rclone's defaultsWith --fast-list --checksumMonth you restoreChecked
1 OVHcloud Object Storage Infrequent Access France (Gravelines) $52.78 $4.06Requests $0.00 $4.06Requests $0.00 $8.12
2 Telnyx Cloud Storage Regular Storage United States (US East) $66.36 $5.53Requests $0.00 $5.53Requests $0.00 $5.53
3 IDrive e2 United States (Virginia) $72.00 $6.00Requests $0.00 $6.00Requests $0.00 $6.00
4 Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage United States (US West) $82.56 $6.88Requests $0.00 $6.88Requests $0.00 $6.88
5 Storj Standard Distributed worldwide $91.00 $7.00Requests $0.00 $7.00Requests $0.00 $14.00
6 Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage United States (US East 1) $95.88 $7.99Requests $0.00 $7.99Requests $0.00 $7.99
7 Hetzner Object Storage Germany (Falkenstein) $95.88 $7.99Requests $0.00 $7.99Requests $0.00 $7.99
8 Scaleway Object Storage Standard One Zone France (Paris) $118.23 $8.99Requests $0.00 $8.99Requests $0.00 $19.34
9 Tigris Archive Instant Retrieval Automatic location $134.87 $8.90Requests $5.18 $3.74Requests $0.01 $36.97
10 DigitalOcean Spaces Cold Storage United States (New York 3) $138.24 $11.52Requests $0.00 $11.52Requests $0.00 $11.52
11 Oracle OCI Object Storage Infrequent Access United States (Ashburn) $151.50 $11.85Requests $2.64 $9.21Requests $0.00 $21.15
12 Filebase Object Storage Distributed worldwide $167.64 $13.97Requests $0.00 $13.97Requests $0.00 $13.97
13 Cloudflare R2 Standard Automatic location $180.00 $15.00Requests $0.00 $15.00Requests $0.00 $15.00
14 Vultr Object Storage Standard United States (New Jersey) $216.00 $18.00Requests $0.00 $18.00Requests $0.00 $18.00
15 Azure Blob Storage Cold LRS United States (East US) rclone's azureblob backend reads dates from the listing, so its defaults make no extra reads $217.48 $8.89Requests $5.54 $3.63Requests $0.27 $119.69
16 Akamai Cloud Object Storage United States (US East) $240.00 $20.00Requests $0.00 $20.00Requests $0.00 $20.00
17 Amazon S3 One Zone-IA United States (Northern Virginia) $304.82 $18.37Requests $9.06 $9.41Requests $0.09 $102.75
18 Google Cloud Storage Nearline United States (South Carolina) $346.56 $19.77Requests $10.46 $9.39Requests $0.08 $129.09

Scaleway Object Storage publishes its prices in euros; its bills are converted at $1.1193 per euro, the European Central Bank's reference rate of 23 October 2026.

13 of these vendors bill nothing for this sync's requests, so the flags save nothing there. Classes that make each file wait to be restored are left out: before rclone can read one back, "you need to restore the object(s) in question". The bills are for rclone's s3 backend, which works with every vendor here but Azure; Azure has no S3 API, and rclone's azureblob backend gets each file's date with the listing, "so there is no performance overhead to using it". rclone, Glacier · rclone, Azure Blob Storage

Price your own rclone sync Price it with --fast-list --checksum

The calculator opens on this sync, with its listings and reads entered as requests: when you change the size to yours, change those to your own files, folders and nights too.

What rclone asks of the bucket in a month

Requestrclone's defaultsWith --fast-list --checksum
Folder listings, one a folder, or one per 1,000 objects300,0007,500
Reading each file's modification time7,500,0000
Uploads of new and changed files5,0005,000
A check after each upload5,0005,000

The other ways to skip the date reads each miss something rclone names:

  • --size-only reads no dates and compares sizes only: "If the file doesn't change size then rclone won't detect it has changed."
  • --update --use-server-modtime compares your file's date with the day it was uploaded: "Files created with timestamps in the past will be missed by the sync", such as a file copied in from another disk with its old date kept.
  • --fast-list holds the whole listing in memory, about 1 KB an object by rclone's own reckoning: about 250 MB for 250,000 files.
  • The check after each upload can be turned off with --s3-no-head, but rclone warns that it "increases the chance for undetected upload failures". It is 5,000 reads a month here: leave it on.

rclone, Amazon S3 Storage Providers

A nightly run that cannot empty the bucket

  1. rclone copy "doesn't delete files from the destination", so a file deleted at home stays in the bucket. rclone sync makes the bucket match, "including deleting files if necessary". rclone copy · rclone sync
  2. Run any new command with --dry-run first. rclone's own words on sync: "Since this can cause data loss, test first with the --dry-run or the --interactive/i flag."
  3. Cap the deletions with --max-delete, for example --max-delete 500. On the night the source disk does not mount, the folder looks empty and a sync would delete everything in the bucket. With a cap, a night that would delete more stops instead: "a fatal error will be generated and rclone will stop the operation in progress". rclone, --max-delete
  4. With sync, keep what it replaces: --backup-dir moves "any files which would have been overwritten or deleted" into a folder you name on the same remote, in their original folders. They stay billed until you delete them. rclone, --backup-dir
  5. On Backblaze B2 with rclone's b2 backend, "the default setting of B2 is to keep old versions of files", and a deleted file is "marked hidden and still be available", so old versions keep being billed until the bucket's lifecycle settings remove them or you add --b2-hard-delete. rclone, Backblaze B2
  6. To make the uploads immutable, rclone sets Object Lock on each one with --s3-object-lock-mode and --s3-object-lock-retain-until-date. Which vendors offer Object Lock

Put together, a nightly line that keeps what it replaces and stops before a mass delete:

rclone sync /srv/data remote:bucket/current --fast-list --checksum --max-delete 500 --backup-dir remote:bucket/old/$(date +%F) --dry-run

Read what the dry run says it would delete and replace, then run it again without --dry-run. Each night's replaced files go to a folder named for the date, "the same remote as the destination" but outside the synced folder, as rclone requires; rclone suggests "today's date as the directory name". In a crontab line, write each % as \%: cron turns an unescaped % into a line break. rclone, --backup-dir · crontab(5)

Test a restore every month

  1. Bring one folder back to a new place, never over the original: rclone copy remote:bucket/Documents /tmp/restore-test.
  2. Compare it with the source: rclone check /path/to/Documents /tmp/restore-test. rclone check "compares sizes and hashes (MD5 or SHA1) and logs a report of files that don't match. It doesn't alter the source or destination."
  3. To check the whole bucket without bringing it back, run rclone check between your files and the bucket: it compares the hashes the bucket keeps. With --download it downloads every file to compare the data itself, and that download is billed like a restore. rclone check

What bringing everything back costs at each vendor is the month-you-restore column above; the restore cost guide works it out for your own size.

On Windows, Mac and Linux

rclone is one program on every system, rclone.exe on Windows. Version 1.75.2 needs at least Windows 10 or Server 2016, macOS 12 (Monterey), Linux kernel 3.2, FreeBSD 12.2 and OpenBSD 6.9. The bills above are the same on each: the bucket receives the same files.

It makes no snapshot of its own, so watch the files a program keeps changing. rclone checks each file's size and modification time while it uploads it, and when either changes it stops with a message that starts "can't copy - source file is being updated". With sync, that one error also holds back the night's deletions: "Files in the destination won't be deleted if there were any errors at any point", so what you deleted on the computer stays in the bucket, billed, until a night runs without errors. Leave out what is always open, such as a running database's files, and back it up through the program's own backup: SQL Server's own backup to a bucket is priced on its page.

rclone, Local Filesystem · rclone sync · rclone, downloads and OS requirements

What rclone config asks for at each vendor

At the Storage> prompt, choose the backend; for s3, choose the provider too, and give the vendor's own S3 endpoint for its region. Where rclone's list does not name a vendor, choose provider Other.

rclone 1.75.2, released . rclone, s3 providers · b2 · azureblob · Google Cloud Storage · Oracle Object Storage · Storj

How the bills are worked out

1 TB of files, about 250,000 files of 4 MB in 10,000 folders, synced to the bucket every night with rclone sync or rclone copy. Each month 5,000 files (20 GB) are new or changed, and each is uploaded whole: all are under rclone's 200 MiB multipart cutoff. With rclone's defaults each night lists every folder and reads every file's modification time, 300,000 listings and 7.5 million reads a month, plus a check after each upload; with --fast-list --checksum it is 7,500 listings and the upload checks. The month you restore, all 1 TB comes back over the internet, one download per file.

Each bill comes from the vendor's own published rates through the same engine as the calculator, checked on the date beside it. The folders and the files changed each month are an example; the requests follow from them as rclone's documentation describes. Listings are billed as each vendor bills them, which at some is as an upload.

Related: other backup tools and their storage · storage for a restic repository · storage with no request fees · what requests cost at each vendor

rclone's pages behind this one